


Aftermath

by KnightNight7203



Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-09-25
Packaged: 2018-07-25 23:55:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 35,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7552123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KnightNight7203/pseuds/KnightNight7203
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And if you wanted me to take my shirt off, you should have just asked." In which Jack has no choice but to turn to Katherine for help, and it's not as bad as he expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Jack?”

Katherine P-Plumber struggles to keep the shock out of her voice. She certainly didn’t expect to see the newsboy sprawled on the end of her bed when she returned to her small flat at the end of the day. Truth be told, she isn’t sure she expected to see him ever again. She didn’t know if the temptation of Santa Fe, glittering on the horizon of his boyish dreams, would prove too much for him to resist.

More than that, she wasn’t sure he’d be willing to return after all that had happened between them. The lies that had been told. The truths that had been withheld or avoided.

She stares at his face as he blinks up at her, and it washes over her suddenly how very much she missed him. The silence after the strike was unbearable, the little signs that things were better – the larger stacks of papers the boys could now sell back, the bigger meals they could now be seen devouring hungrily after work – not quite enough to ease the emptiness in her heart. Of course, there was plenty to miss – her job now that she is blacklisted, the easy relationship she had with the boys, her father and his trust in her she fears she will never gain back (if she even wants to).

But staring at Jack, bruised and tired as he appears to be, she knows it was him she missed most of all.

“Hullo, Ace,” he says casually, pushing himself into a sitting position and offering no explanation for his presence. Never mind that; she doesn’t need one – she knows how he got in. She hasn’t locked her window, which looks out on a rickety fire escape, since the strike ended. Since he disappeared.

“It’s been three days.”

He says nothing, just stares at her with that maddening, almost impertinent stare.

“Three days, Jack. Not even the boys have heard from you.” Her voice is softer now that she is no longer afraid to let emotion enter it.

Finally, he speaks. “Yeah. I know.” His tone is not apologetic, but it’s lacking his usual confidence, too. Stepping further into the room and switching on another lamp, Katherine can see that he looks pale and drawn, like he’s had even less food and sleep than usual.

“We didn’t now where you were. We thought–“

“Thought what? Huh?”

He looks injured, glaring at her defensively. She’s not sure how that could have possibly upset him, but then, he always did run on a peculiar moral code. Perhaps the thought of his boys doubting him is too much to bear, after everything they’ve been through.

“ _I_ thought that – that you left. For Santa Fe. Or just – somewhere I wasn’t.”

He smirks at the raw anxiety in her voice. Cocky idiot – of course he’d take her continued attachment to him as evidence of his own irresistible charm. “You think you’re enough to get me to leave my boys, Ace?”

“No– no,” she stammers, in a much softer voice. “Of course I didn’t mean–“

He rolls off the bed and grabs her shoulders, effectively silencing her. “You think I would leave you?” he asks, his voice soft and husky. She shivers.

“I don’t–“ Her hands begin to move almost on their own accord, skimming over his sides.

“Nah,” he says, spinning away from her and coming to rest against her dresser, leaning on the edge with a confidence she isn’t sure is real. “I just had some business to take care of.”

She raises an eyebrow, more confident now that the shock has worn off. “Oh? And what kind of business is that?”

Jack shakes his head, his expression darkening. “It’s nothing, Ace. Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She studies him, and he looks vaguely uncomfortable. He tugs aside the collar of his shirt to rub his neck, revealing skin underneath, and Katherine gasps.

More bruises mottle the pale skin beneath the fabric, peppered across his throat and collarbone. Jack tugs the cloth back into place sharply, eyes already darting for an escape route. Her heart breaks for him, the way he guards his feelings and refuses to let anyone help him. Then her sympathy disappears rather abruptly as she places her body between him and the window and is then thrust aside rather rudely and violently.

“Don’t you dare.” Her voice rings out through the small room. Jack pauses, one leg already out onto the fire escape. She scowls at him. “Get your ass back here, Jack Kelly.”

His eyes are wide with reluctance and more than a little fear. She wonders if it’s her or the thought of discovering the extent of his injuries that terrifies him so.

She places a hand on his arm, coaxing him back in and shutting the window firmly behind him. He moves across the room from her, glowering.

“Stop being such a _girl_ , Ace,” he mutters. “Oversensitive, overbearing–“

“Over-intelligent and overpowering?” she asks sweetly, but with an edge. Then her expression softens. She crosses to him. “Who was it?”

“Who do you think?” His voice is heavy with sarcasm. “The charming Delancey brothers. Probably paid by your daddy.” He sighs. “It’s easy to take them one at a time in the middle of Newsie Square, in broad daylight surrounded by a bunch of guys. Both of them in an alley alone after dark?” Chuckling weakly, he leans against the wall, for support, she thinks. “Barely got away.”

Halfway through carefully unbuttoning the buttons on his blue shirt, she looks up at him. “You think my _father_ had something to do with this?” she gasps. She’s not sure which wounds her more; the fact that Jack suggested it, or the fact that it very well may be true.

He just shrugs, though. “Maybe. I’m sure there’s plenty of rich, powerful guys who ain’t too happy with me right now. The Delancey brothers’ll beat up anyone so long as the pay’s good.” He laughs darkly. “Though they’d probably agree to go after me for nothing.”

“They’ve been following you this whole time?” she asks, returning to the buttons. Her fingers are trembling now; she’s not quite sure why. “For three entire days?”

“I’ve seen them around.” Jack is carefully looking anywhere but her. Right now he’s studying a family portrait that had been taken several years back, when she still lived at home and her mother was still alive. “Didn’t want to lead them to the boys. Or you.”

“They know where the boys live,” she points out. “And me, probably.”

He shakes his head violently. “Couldn’t give them a reason to pick a fight with you, too.”

She’s reached the last button, but lets the fabric hang closed. “They’ve gone now? They’re satisfied?”

He frowns, shaking his head slower. “I don’t know. I just got hungry.” Sure enough, his stomach makes a rather angry sound.

Unable to put it off any longer, she pulls the shirt from his shoulders. It drops to the floor, forgotten, as she takes in his injuries. The skin of his chest and stomach is covered with livid bruises, more of it dark blue and purple than his normal flesh tone. There are definitely vague outlines of fingers imprinted around his neck, and she thinks she can make out a boot print or two further down. Some of the bruises are faded, though, and she can tell most are at least a day old.

“You should have come here right away,” she admonishes gently.

“And if you wanted me to take my shirt off, you should have just asked,” he retorts suggestively, his breath hitching as her fingers pass over his ribs.

“Shut up,” she says distractedly, her frown deepening. “I’m no expert–“ he snorts “–but I think you may have broken a few.”

“Well, the Delancies might have done that,” Jack mutters. “You know. I didn’t exactly break my own ribs.”

“Are you delusional?” Katherine asks, mildly concerned.

“Just hungry, I think. I may have mentioned that.”

She sighs. Some things never change. Her arms are around him gently now, and her fingers brush raised cuts on his back, but they’ve already begun to heal and there isn’t much she can do.

“Come on,” she says, dropping her arms from his sides and taking his hand instead. He follows slowly.

“Hang on,” he says suddenly. “Can I put my shirt back on?”

She smiles a little. God, she loves him. “It’s got blood on it. I’ll find you a new one.”

“But, Ace. I’ve got blood on _me_ ,” he counters. “The new shirt’ll get bloody, too.”

Now she’s beginning to laugh outright, and after a minute, he cracks a smile too.

“Tell you what,” she says. “How about if you wash the blood off, and I’ll find you clean clothes and food?”

Jack nods seriously, though his eyes are still bright. “I think that sounds acceptable,” he agrees. As she pushes him into the bathroom and pulls the door shut, still giggling like a little girl, she can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief that he’s safe and with her once more.


	2. Chapter 2

When Jack emerges from the bathroom dressed in a clean white cotton shirt and dark pants that are slightly too big around the waist, he looks much happier, if not any healthier, than before.

“You’ve got a _shower,_ ” he informs Katherine in awe, running a hand through his still-damp hair and settling his familiar hat comfortably back on his head.

“I am aware,” she smiles. He just shakes his head, stepping past her into the kitchen.

“Wait till I tell the boys,” he says. Katherine pales, knowing what that will mean.

“Jack, I don’t–“

“They’d love to see that,” he murmurs, almost to himself, and she can’t find it in her heart to keep something so simple, which would make the newsboys so happy, to herself.

“They’re welcome any time,” she amends. His grin, despite the bruises on his face, brightens up the whole room. He flops into a chair, stretching his long legs under the table, and smiles up at her. Her heart melts a little more.

She sets a plate down in front of him nervously. She’s never been much of a cook – any cook at all, really. But he looks at the bread and cold chicken left over from her own earlier meal as though it was a fine feast, and doesn’t say a word about its taste to her.

He eats slowly, and she watches him for awhile, but eventually the way he keeps one arm wrapped around his middle and the bruises that are all too visible from across the room get to her, and she turns and wanders into her living room. She runs her fingers distractedly along the spines of the books on her bookshelf, but all of the titles are painfully familiar. She’s read each at least three times.

Finally she sits down at her typewriter. There’s a page already in the machine, blank except for the heading: **RESUME**. She stares at it, as uninspired as she had been when she abandoned the project earlier. How do you reapply for the job you only lost because your father (who happened to be Joseph Pulitzer) didn’t like how your skilled writing questioned his employment practices? Halfheartedly, she presses some keys.

~~ **Contributed to the success of newsboy strike with front-page article** **.** ~~

Perhaps it isn’t the best idea to have the very thing that got her fired as the first item on the list.

~~ **Seasoned writer, reviewed flower shows and performances for over two years** **.** ~~

No good, if she doesn’t want to be stuck in the Entertainment beat for the rest of her career. If there is any career ahead of her at all.

She stares at the mostly-blank paper, unable to shake the feeling that it’s mocking her. Slumping, she pushes the typewriter away from her.

When she looks up he’s just standing in the doorway staring at her. She smiles, her good mood immediately restored,and rises to meet him. Taking his hand, she pulls him to her room again, where she opens the window and climbs up onto the fire escape herself. He joins her, lowering himself onto the grated platform to sit beside her. They are just close enough that they are barely touching, their sleeves brushing each other when they shift in position.

The moon is full, and the alley below her window is bathed in the silvery light. To the right, on the main road, carriages still crowd the streets, despite the fact that it’s past ten. The quiet city sounds wash over her, calming her, and she can smell something sugary wafting in the breeze from the small cafe on the corner that never closes until early in the morning, when all but the most dedicated insomniacs have returned home. Katherine doesn’t know what Jack’s thinking, but she knows she loves New York.

He breathes out a soft sigh, one that’s equal parts content and defeated. “I don’t know if I can do this much longer.”

She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t take her gaze away from the quiet alley below. She wants to make him feel better, but she’s not sure what particular part of his rough life is wearing on him now, or how to comfort him without knowing. Furthermore, she can hear the vulnerable note in his voice. She doesn’t want to scare him into saying nothing at all.

“You could come, you know. You and the boys.”

She knows without asking now that he’s talking about Santa Fe. Again. “Jack,” she says warningly, but he holds up a hand to stop her protests.

“There are plenty of jobs in Santa Fe. After that article you wrote, the papers would be fightin’ over you. And just think how happy the boys would be. Crutchie wouldn’t have to worry about his leg. Dave and Les could get a big house with their parents. The air would be clean, you could see the stars at night.” He trails off, looking off into the distance. She has a feeling he’s seeing open sky and plains rather than the tall buildings and crowded streets of the city.

“We could,” she says slowly, slipping her hand into his. He ducks his head, hiding an awkward grin in his shoulder. For some reason, signs of her affection for him still surprise him. “But I stand by what I said before.”

“That you’ll go wherever I go?”

“No. Well, yes, but also that you should be illustrating the paper.” It was something she’d given a lot of thought to the past few days, and she knew that finding him a place where he could be happy in New York was a big step toward getting him to stay.

“Huh?” He looks at her, skepticism plain on his face. He was clearly not expecting this. “Yeah, like that would ever happen.”

She nudges him with her shoulder, drawing back instantly when he cringes. She’d forgotten the bruises. He doesn’t complain, though, just stares at her as if she’s grown another head. She thinks he’s too distracted by the direction the conversation has taken to even notice the pain.

“Seriously, Jack. Everyone saw your pictures in the Newsie Banner. _Governor Roosevelt_ saw your pictures, and they helped him close the Refuge. You don’t think you could get a job?”

He makes a vague gesture to himself, shakes his head emphatically, and then turns away. “Uh, no.”

“Why not?” She glares at him, almost daring him to say something about the fact that he lives on the streets, or that his clothes are threadbare and worn, or that he can barely afford a meal a lot of the time. After all, getting a better job is the only thing that could fix that. But he finally settles on the argument that’s kept him in New York all these years, the one that keeps him waking up every morning for another day of hard work.

“I can’t leave the boys to work in some fancy office or something. I’m a newsie, like them, and we stick together.”

“Maybe if you illustrated a paper, you could decide your own hours. Work on a drawing at home, turn it in before work in the morning. Then you wouldn’t have to leave the boys, but you’d make more money, too.”

“I don’t think they make jobs like that,” he tells her. His voice is unemotional, casual even, but she can see a trace of disappointment in his eyes, and that’s how she knows he really regrets not having that kind of opportunity. The wind ruffles his hair gently beneath his hat, and she smiles at him.

“I’ll get you a job like that,” she tells him. “At the _Sun,_ or the _World._ ”

“Yeah,” he says sarcastically, rolling his eyes skyward. “Bet your dad would love to have me workin’ for him.”

“The _Sun,_ then,” she amends. She’s vaguely uncomfortable talking about her father with Jack, so she readily lets that issue drop. She still feels horribly for everything Pulitzer did specifically to break Jack, sending Crutchie to the refuge and threatening the rest of the newsies when he didn’t surrender. She knows how much it got to him, even if he never said so. “I’m going to the office demand my job back tomorrow. I’ll get you an interview.”

He snorts, studying her with an eyebrow raised. “Let me get this straight. You’re just gonna march in there and demand that they hire you?”

She shrugs. “My father has no reason to stop me from writing now that the strike’s been resolved. There shouldn’t be a problem. I’m a good writer. They know that at the _Sun_. And the article did get them a lot of business–”

“You’re gonna demand your job, and then you’re gonna demand one for me?” he interrupts. “You’re intimidating, Ace, but that’s a lot of demanding.”

She smiles and leans against him gently with a sigh. He shrinks away at first, like he’s afraid it’s going to hurt or is just intimidated by the small expression of affection, but eventually he leans back so he’s flush with her body.

“Everything will work out,” she tells him softly.

“I hope so,” he murmurs into her hair. “I hope so.”


	3. Chapter 3

They stay like that for a long time, until his breathing is slow and even and she’s sure he’s fallen asleep just sitting there on the fire escape. She closes her eyes, feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest. She doesn’t even think of moving until light rain drops begin to fall from the sky, dripping onto her skin and sending shivers down her spine.

“Jack.”

She gently extricates herself from his arms, and he blinks up at her slowly. “Huh?”

“It’s raining,” she tells him softly. He runs a hand across his face, brushing off the water that’s already gathered there. There are droplets on his eyelashes, shining in the light from the street lamps far below.

“What time is it?”

She smiles at his sleepy expression and messy hair. Even his hat didn’t prevent it from getting all disheveled as he leaned back against her window. “Late. After midnight, at least.”

“Wow.” His voice is tired and scratchy, and he clears his throat. “I’d better get back. The boys will be worried. Nobody’ll be out in this weather, anyway.” She knows he means the Delancies – he won’t have to worry about another attack tonight. It’s the perfect chance for him to return home.

She eyes the sky uncertainly, though. The heavy cloud cover is completely blocking the light of the full moon, so she knows it’s thick.

“The rain is only going to get worse, and it’s a long way back,” she says warningly. A streak of lightning flashes across the sky, lending weight to her words. Raindrops fall faster now, soaking into her skirt and weighing her down as she stands, reaching out a hand to him. She could lend him an umbrella, but she’s not sure she wants him to leave yet. “They’ve waited this long; they can wait a few hours more. They’ll all be asleep anyway.”

He shrugs, catching her fingers in his own and letting her pull him through the window. And because she’s selfish, she does. The boys have had Jack all their lives. She’s only just found him.

Her free hand reaches up to snatch the cap off his head, and while he grabs for it weakly, he lets it go in the end. She hangs it on a hook in the hallway, where it drips water onto the floor with a small splash. Thankfully the rest of him is mostly dry – she doesn’t exactly have any more clothes lying around that would fit him. The outfit he’s wearing now had been left here by her father, from nearly a year earlier when his own home was being renovated and he had nowhere else to go. She’s definitely not going to tell him that, though. She’s fairly sure he’d rather be soaking wet or covered in blood – or naked – than dressed in something that once belonged to Pulitzer.

She pushes that thought quickly out of her mind. Her mouth is dry as she starts rummaging around in the cupboard for cups, fumbling with the tea bags after she sets the water boiling.

He comes up behind her and reaches around her, one arm on either side, to pull the kettle from the stove. “I got it, Ace.”

She ducks under his arm to freedom and raises an eyebrow. “You can cook?”

“It’s not cooking,” he snorts. “It’s tea. Cheap tea, at that,” he comments, eyeing the label. “The question is, can you?”

“I’ve made tea before,” she says defensively. He’s questioning the quality of her tea? “Once or twice.”

Jack pries the cups gently from her hands. “If you want my opinion, you got the tea bags for Christmas, and used them one time to make whoever gave them to you happy before going back to the cafe down on the corner for drinks. I ain’t stupid. What you gave me earlier was good, but it was leftovers from that place.”

“I’ve made at least three cups,” she mutters, but by this point he’s already done, setting two steaming mugs on the table, and so she gives up. She knows he doesn’t care if she can cook or not anyway.

She sits across from him, her damp skirt dragging on the ground. He holds the cup in his hands but doesn’t drink from it. His foot moves closer to her own, playing with it gently under the table. His bare feet feel icy even through her socks.

“Aren’t you cold?” she asks.

“Not really.”

“Tired?”

He sighs. “Yeah.” He finally takes a sip, and makes a face. “I can see why you didn’t use the rest of this.”

She gives him a smug look. “There’s sugar over–“ But he’s already found it, carrying it back to the table and dumping a generous amount in both of their cups.

His cold toes find hers again when he sits down, and his skin brushes directly against hers through a small hole in the bottom of her sock. She shivers.

“I’ll get you a pair of socks,” she says, abandoning her tea. Even with all of the sugar Jack put in it, she still doesn’t really like it. He protests quietly but eventually follows her out of the kitchen. In her room again, she digs out the thickest pair of socks she owns and hands them to him. He smiles as his fingers brush hers.

She pulls a nightdress and thick dressing gown out of a drawer and walks quickly to the bathroom to change. When she returns to hang her damp skirts in her closet, pulling the dressing gown tight even though it covers more than her dress did, he’s sitting on the floor in front of her bed, his eyes almost closed. “Got a blanket, Ace?” he murmurs. “I’ll head on over to the couch . . .”

She pictures her tiny sofa that even she can’t lie down on comfortably. His long legs will be sticking over the edge. “Jack, you’re already going to be sore. You definitely won’t be able to walk in the morning if you sleep on that. You take the bed.”

He snorts. “Uh, no. I ain’t taking your bed, Ace. That’s not– no. Nope.” He’s standing now, backing toward the door. At least he’s stopped going for the window like he can actually get away from her.

“Fine.” Her response makes it seem like she’s giving in, but her tone is anything but agreeable. “Aren’t you at least going to kiss me goodnight?”

“Huh?” His voice is high-pitched.

She pulls the covers down and arranges the pillows, waiting. Sure enough, he comes up behind her, tentatively. She pulls him gently to her, kissing him quickly on the cheek. Then she shoves him into the bed, none too gently, ignoring his gasp at the pressure on his ribs. She turns off the light, walking towards the door.

“Ace.” His voice sounds loud in the dark, not angry but contemplating. “Ain’t _you_ going to kiss _me_ goodnight?”

“Kelly,” she says warningly, but she goes anyway. How could she not? And though she’s almost expecting it, it comes as a shock when he yanks her down beside him. They both go to leap off the bed at exactly the same time, ending up falling back next to each other. Katherine giggles, half amused and entirely awkward. Jack joins in a moment later.

After a few minutes he rises again, fully intending to move to the couch, but her hand catches his sleeve.

“Don’t go,” she whispers softly. “Please.”

His hand finds hers in the dark. She smiles.

“Okay, Ace. Goodnight.”


	4. Chapter 4

The morning dawns sluggishly, the way it can only in the haze of the busy city. Jack hasn’t stirred – he must be exhausted – but Katherine has been awake for awhile now. She’s always been a morning person.

His face is peaceful in sleep, and she studies him thoughtfully. There is none of his trademark sarcasm etched in his features, nor the perpetual frown he’s been wearing for days now. His mouth is soft, relaxed, and his hair is hanging loosely over his forehead and sticking up in the back without his hat to keep it down. He looks young, and not for the first time, she’s reminded that he’s little more than a child. A boy who has seen so much, done even more, and been through worse conditions at age seventeen than she’s sure her father ever faced in all of his fifty three years.

Not that she’s much older.

Their hands are still entwined, and she knows she should leave now, move to the couch since he’s not awake to protest. The soft echo of her mother’s voice rings in her ears – _Katherine Pulitzer, for propriety’s sake, remember your upbringing! What will people think?_ How her mother would shudder if she could see her now – a working woman, with cheap, practical clothes and fingers stained with ink, curled against the leader of the newsboy strike who has no home or even any possessions to call his own. She would call her a disgrace. She’d probably disown her faster than her father had.

But she is happy.

She’s doing something that makes a difference in the world. Rather than living in some luxurious home and attending elegant parties at the arm of some handsome suitor with whom she would share few, if any, interests, she’s making her own name for herself, one not tied to the success of her father in any way. More than that, she’s improving the lives of sweet, funny, _good_ boys with no one else to turn to, boys who have given her more adventures in a single day than she’d ever had before and who have more friends than anyone with money she’s ever met. Thanks to her, they can afford to eat. Thanks to her, they take pride in their jobs. And thanks to them, it’s a little easier for her to smile, to laugh.

If her mother knew anything about happiness, it wasn’t the same kind of happiness that Katherine has found. A frilly hat or tickets to a play would give her nowhere near the same feeling that seeing a smile creep across Crutchie’s or Spec’s face does, that watching Race buy Les a drink or seeing Jack’s sketches do.

She doesn’t move, except to pull the blankets tighter around her shoulders.

* * *

The next time she opens her eyes, the room is much brighter, and she’s entangled in her blankets all alone. At first she’s confused as to why that feels so wrong. After all, everything is as it should be, all things considered. Then she remembers.

There are no signs that Jack was ever even there the night before. The other side of her bed is made, his hat isn’t on the hook in the hallway, and the only towel in the bathroom is hers. She has a brief moment of panic. What if he went out and the Delancies find him? What if he’s left for Santa Fe and last night was the only goodbye she’ll ever get? What if it was all a dream and he was never even there?

But she finds him in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up past his elbows and one of her old aprons (that she never used) hung loosely around his neck as he moves something around in a pan on the stove. His hat is back on his head, and from the back he looks more put together than the day before, but when he turns to face her she sees that his eye is turning a nasty shade of yellow and cringes internally.

“I was going to go into work this morning,” she scolds by way of greeting. It’s easier than acknowledging the previous night.

“You looked too peaceful to wake up,” he says, not apologetic in the least. He smiles cheekily at her, and despite the black eye he looks gorgeous, so she smiles back. “Plus, they fired you. You can go _demand_ your job back whenever you want. You ain’t got to be there when the place opens.”

She tilts her head. “Touché. Are you _cooking?”_

He raises his eyebrows at her. “What? I thought we established last night that I can?”

There it is: _Last night._ She can feel her cheeks growing warm as she turns her back on him and sits down a little harder than she meant to at the table, sending the chair back on two legs before she steadies herself. She pushes the image of her mother’s face out of her head and rubs her eyes.

“I didn’t even know I had anything _to_ cook,” she mutters, but as he scrapes some eggs and toast onto a plate and puts it in front of her, she can see he’s managed to make something edible from relatively few ingredients. He’s found her good plates, the ones with little flowers twisting around the edge, though she’s not sure how – they were on the top shelf of a back cabinet she never uses. One thing is for sure – he’s a lot more at home in her kitchen than she is.

He sits with his own plate across the table from her again, but doesn’t eat as much as he did the day before. In fact, he barely takes a few bites before he pushes his fork away, looking a little sick. She wonders if he feels much worse today. He hasn’t complained – but then, he never really does.

She starts out nibbling at the corner of the bread, but soon she’s shoveling eggs into her mouth. They’re just the right combination of thick and creamy, with a little bit of milk and cheese mixed throughout. The toast is brown around the edges and soft in the middle, with butter spread evenly over the surface. In short, the breakfast is even better than the one she normally stops for at her favorite cafe on the way to work. And that’s saying something, because that food isn’t cheap.

“Okay,” she demands. “ _Where_ did you learn to do this?”

He shrugs, avoiding her eyes. “Around. I ain’t been a newsie my whole life, you know.”

“Come on, Jack,” she says, laughing. “This is amazing. You didn’t just pick it up on the street.” She regrets saying that as soon as it leaves her mouth – it makes it sound like she thinks living on the street is a bad thing, and he has to know she doesn’t feel that way. She’s opening her mouth to try to fix her previous comment somehow when he answers softly.

“The Refuge, okay?” He finally meets her eyes, and his are haunted.

She’s shocked into silence. Not so much because he learned such an impressive skill from such a horrible place – although that surprises her as well – but because he actually admitted it. These past few days she’s been with him, he’s barely mentioned the Refuge, except to relay the condition Crutchie was in there. Even when she questioned him about his drawings, he just deflected her curiosity with sarcastic comments about her own upbringing. The fact that he’s brought it up in conversation conveys to Katherine exactly how much he’s beginning to trust her – and how tired he must be becoming of keeping everything locked up inside.

If anything, he seems to take her silence as an encouragement to keep talking. His voice isn’t quiet, but it’s a little shaky. “They didn’t feed us anything worth crap there, of course. Just hard, stale bread – we was lucky if it wasn’t moldy – and water, mostly. Sometimes something that was supposed to be meat, if we’d been real good that day. But Snyder, he ate well, and we was supposed to get it ready for him.”

“Did all the boys take turns in the kitchen?” she asks softly. As much as she doesn’t want to upset him by pressing the subject, it’s hard for her to suppress her inquisitive side. What makes her a good reporter is often what drives other people away. She bites her lip nervously.

“Nah,” he says, sounding nonchalant but becoming visibly even more tense. “I was sent there for ‘bad behavior.’ Something to do with talking back and inciting rebellion among the other kids.”

“So that’s something of a trend with you?” she asks jokingly. She wants to give him an out if he needs it, so that he knows he can stop talking about the Refuge and she won’t mind. He cracks a small smile but returns to the subject.

“Ha, guess so. The kitchen was this room with no windows, hot and isolated and hard to breathe in, and the few people who worked there full time were mean and not afraid to whack you with a broom handle. I guess they thought I wouldn’t be able to cause any trouble there. And I didn’t, either, for awhile. Just threw ingredients in a pot till I got something that tasted okay, that Snyder wouldn’t turn up his greasy nose at. Eventually I got caught sneaking food out for the other boys. But I guess whatever I picked up before that stayed with me.”

By now his face is white, and she wonders if he’s seeing her or distant echoes of his time in that place. She’s almost afraid to ask, but she has to. It’s her hamartia, her fatal flaw. She can’t help it.

“And what happened? When they caught you?” she asks softly, gently.

“Oh, Snyder didn’t do so much himself,” he admits in a strained voice. Katherine wants to breathe a sigh of relief, but something about his tone makes her feel like this isn’t exactly a saving grace. “Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, I guess. But there were boys there – big boys, ones who’d done a hell of a lot worse than hang around outside a store or steal a loaf of bread for a starving kid – who were only too happy to . . . to make sure a guy was sorry he’d ever even been born.”

“Jack.” She reaches for his hand across the table, but he doesn’t move. His fingers are cold.

“The stuff they did . . . It was bad.” She thinks he wants to get it all off his chest now, before he loses his nerve. She certainly knows the feeling – once he knew who she was, once she explained her deception on the rooftop, she’d felt much better. “Stuff that makes it hurt to move for days, stuff that makes you question if–“ he trails off, eyeing her like he doesn’t want to tell her some of the worst. “And they probably got time off their sentence for helping Snyder out,” he finishes bitterly.

“At least you got out,” she whispers.

He smiles humorlessly. “Yeah. And then I got caught again.”


	5. Chapter 5

“You got caught _again.”_ It isn’t a question or an accusation, it’s somewhere in between.

He nods, his eyes focusing somewhere over her shoulder.

“You were humiliated and beaten within an inch of your life in there and still risked being sent back just to give the boys a few blankets and a loaf of bread.”

He shrugs. “It was winter, they was freezing to death in there. No heat. It was worth it. Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

She sighs. The phrase is eerily similar to his earlier excuses meant to explain why he hadn’t turned to anyone for help escaping the Delancies. “Jack Kelly, I really don’t deserve you.”

Snorting, he pushes back in his seat. Her fingers slide from his to rest limply on the table as he grips the edge of his chair and leans back on two of the legs. “Uh huh. I think it’s more the other way around. But sure.”

“Jack.”

They eye each other across the table, neither willing to give in. It’s the previous night all over again, only over something more serious. She desperately wants him to understand that all she sees is him and her, none of the rules and classes and other differences he’s shaping into a wall between them. She has no idea what he thinks she sees, and she wishes she did, because maybe then it would be easier to reassure him.

She decides that changing the subject, at least a little, is the best way to overcome the silence for now. “Was it any better the second time around?” She’s silently praying for a yes. God knows the poor boy deserved a break.

He snorts again. “That’s funny, that. Ha, no. It was way worse. If you’re thrown in the Refuge for doing God knows what in the streets, Snyder takes you cause it’s his job and mistreats you cause he thinks it’s funny. But if you get caught smuggling _into_ the place, right under his nose? It gets personal.”

Katherine doesn’t like the sound of that.

“Well, his punishment was pretty personal in the end, don’t you think?” She’s struggling to sound upbeat in the face of his endless pessimism this morning. “Your drawings landed him in prison, Jack. It’s over, thanks to you.”

“Yeah, and he gets a nice private cell in some fancy jail somewhere and gets out in a couple of years to terrorize some other town.”

Of course it isn’t fair, but that’s the way life seems to be going lately. She wants to make him feel better, even if she’s sure he won’t buy it. “Adult jails aren’t exactly a resort, Jack. Not that I’d wish anything bad on someone–“ at this he raises his eyebrow in disbelief, and she supposes he did witness her bring her father down with his own printing press “–but if anyone deserves a rough time, he does. I knew someone who did an article on one of those places a few months ago. Some of the stuff that goes on there is probably worse than the Refuge.”

All she’d wanted to do is reassure him that Snyder would be punished for what he did to the boys, but she can tell from his angry expression that her words were far more effective in her head. “Worse than the Refuge?”

“Jack, that’s not what I–“

“You reporters think you know everything, don’t you?”

A rush of frustration unfurls within her chest. Last night she was “Ace,” his own special nickname for her, and now she’s “you reporter?” “You know that’s not what I meant. I just wanted to–“

“Let me just say something,” Jack says slowly, his voice strained. “The _only_ way that those places are different than the Refuge, is that the murderers and rapists and psychos are locked up somewhere else so they can be done away with or whatever. You can’t do that with kids, because they don’t _know_ better, or had no _choice_. They all get tossed in the same place, no matter what they’ve done.”

“Jack, I didn’t–“

“Worse than this?” His voice is icy, and his fingers jerk up the bottom edge of his shirt as he jumps up from the table. The bruises are still there, of course. But they are fading now, and beneath them, other scars, pale and thin, have become visible. Jagged lines run across his stomach, disappearing both under his shirt and waistline.

“Jack.” Her voice is a hoarse whisper. The last bites of her breakfast lay cold and forgotten on the plate.

“Knife,” he says by way of explanation, and then she’s in his arms and neither of them are talking, just holding each other because they’re not sure what else can be done.

“Sorry,” he says finally, his breath ghosting over the top of her head and getting lost in her hair. He sounds nervous, like he’s afraid she’s going to yell at him or send him away. “I’m just kinda– I dunno. Tense. Jumpy. Angry.”

“It’s okay,” she murmurs into his shirt, her arms still wrapped tightly around him. “You’re entitled to that.”

“None of this is your fault.”

“It’s okay,” she repeats.

“No. Everything’s better cause of you, Ace.” His fingers trace her cheek, and she has to force herself not to shiver. “Katherine. Look at me.”

And she does. It’s the use of her real name rather than the nickname he gave her that really draws her gaze upward – she’s not sure he’s ever called her that, ever been this serious with her. His eyes have lost that haunted look now, but there’s something else in them, something equally as deep and heartfelt but less angry and afraid.

“I love you,” he says simply, staring down at her with that intense expression. “I know I have no right to, and God knows what’ll come of it, but I do, Ace. I love you.”

“Jack,” she says. _I love you too._ She doesn’t want to say that, she wants words that are more powerful, that can sum up everything he’s done for her and everything he means to her. But she says it anyway, because she can’t think of anything else. Maybe there are some things there aren’t meant to be expressed with words. This will have to be enough.

“I love you too.”

He smiles. “Yeah. I know.” And then he kisses her.

For a second she’s surprised – she really hadn’t expected that, although maybe she should have – but she recovers quickly, and then she’s kissing him back, just as intently. His eyes widen, as if he hadn’t been sure she’d reciprocate. Then his arms come around her, pulling her closer. She can feel his heart beating through his shirt and wonders if he’s as nervous and awkward as she is.

Her hands trace his chest gently, where she imagines the scars continue, but he pulls them away to wrap them around his waist. His own hands then come up to get caught in her hair. They’re pressed so tightly against each other, she can’t tell where she ends and he begins. She could stay in his arms forever, she really could.

By the time they break apart their breathing is heavy, and Jack leans back on the counter, looking immensely pleased with himself and a little tired and unsteady.

“I really have to go to the office now,” she says, stumbling a little as she backs away further. She’s not sure what just happened, or if it should be happening, but she knows she isn’t exactly upset about it.

“Sure you do,” he says, his eyes dancing. She laughs.

“You may be scraping by with your job, Kelly, but as of right now I don’t even have that. I don’t exactly want to have to move in with my father again.”

He shudders exaggeratedly. “I get that, Ace. I get you.”

“Meet me in Central Park in two hours?” He smiles, and she knows he’s not going to be able to say no, however doubtful he is about this meeting she’s about to request.

“If you say so,” he says, still grinning. “You really think this is gonna work?”

“Just you wait and see. By the end of today, we’ll both have jobs, and everything will be looking up.”

“I think things are looking up already,” he says quietly as she turns away. She blushes on her way out the door, leaving him behind safe and sound in her kitchen.


	6. Chapter 6

The office is nearly empty when Katherine pushes the door open, and upon looking at the clock on the wall she realizes that most of the reporters are probably out finding lunch. Having eaten a late breakfast, she didn’t even realize it was after twelve.

The few men who are still in the room don’t even look up from their typewriters as she enters, so she heads straight for the editor’s desk, which is situated in a small room leading off from the main one. As she gets closer, she can hear soft, deep voices emanating from behind the door.

She knocks hesitantly, and it finally hits her that she has no idea how people will react when they learn she wants her job back. God knows most of them didn’t exactly approve of her even when she had a secure position. “Mr. Dana,” she calls nervously when there isn’t a response. “I was wondering if I could have a word?”

“Certainly, Ms. Plumber,” he responds in his warm, charismatic voice. “Although that might not be necessary any longer.”

What did that mean? Pushing inside the office, she stops short when her eyes fall on the man with whom the editor had been speaking.

It’s her father.

Dana continues speaking, oblivious to her dumbfounded reaction. “Mr. Pulitzer here was just explaining to me how, with the strike ended, there is no reason you should not continue to write for the paper. If you would want to return, of course.”

“Of– of course,” she stammers, blinking at him. “That’s actually why I was–“

“Excellent,” her father interrupts, not making eye contact with her or even indicating that he is aware of her presence. She looks down at the ground nervously, afraid of what she will see if she accidentally meets his gaze. “I look forward to seeing you, Mr. Dana,” he continues, reaching out to shake the editors hand. Then he strolls from the room, cane and hat in hand, without another word to either of them.

“You’re very lucky, my dear,” Dana comments finally, staring at the door through which Pulitzer had exited so abruptly. He takes out a handkerchief from his pocket and mops at his balding head. “He seems to have taken a considerable interest in your career. Not that you aren’t an adequate writer, but that is a rare occurrence in any circumstances.”

“Yes,” Katherine says weakly. “I’m sure.”

“Now that that’s settled, you will return to work tomorrow? I have a few stories I think you might have an interest in following . . .” It’s not a request, but a genuine question. It certainly seems as though the appearance of her father has unnerved the editor of the _Sun._

“I will,” she agrees. “But actually, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about as well.”

* * *

Jack isn’t at their meeting spot yet when Katherine arrives in Central Park exactly two hours later. In fact, there aren’t many people around at all, and she takes advantage of the virtual solitude to arrange what she’d brought with her under a nearby tree.

Once she’s created an arrangement that she deems satisfactory, she settles herself on the grass to wait. Two little birds chase each other around a tree nearby, weaving in and out of the branches. A few solitary businessmen pass on the sidewalk, strolling purposefully through the sunshine. Apart from that, everything is still.

“What’s all this?”

He’d snuck up behind her, and her heart jumps when she hears his voice right in her ear. “Jack!”

“Hey,” he says, lowering himself onto the ground beside her. She can tell by his wrinkled clothes and the fact that he’s squinting in the sunlight that he’s only just emerged from her apartment to come here. She’s glad about that. She’d hoped he’d have the sense to stay somewhere no one would find him while she was gone. Maybe he even went back to sleep and continued to let his body repair itself.

“This,” she says, gesturing to the blanket and basket, “is a picnic. A celebratory picnic.”

“And what are we celebrating?” he asks teasingly, maybe even hopefully, his fingers playing with a strand of her hair. She swats his hand away.

“Patience, young newsboy. All good things to those who wait.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, raising his hands in surrender. “No questions. I got it.” Then he points to a shopping bag at the edge of their patch of shade. “That don’t look like food, Ace.”

Her glare, while playful, is enough to make him defensive.

“That wasn’t a question!”

“Well, you’re not getting an answer either way.”

With exaggerated focus, she starts pulling food out of the picnic basket, arranging it on plates on the blanket. There is an assortment of fruit, including strawberries, oranges, blueberries, and grapes, as well as cheese and bread.

“Colorful food, Ace,” he notes. She merely smiles mysteriously. “Can’t help but notice that nothing here needs cooking,” he adds after a pause, half-sticking his tongue out at her. She smacks his arm gently.

“You’re not impressed yet?” she demands. He shrugs, tearing off a chunk of bread and putting it in his mouth.

“That remains to be seen,” he says around the food. She laughs at his efforts to keep it from spilling out.

Picking at grapes halfheartedly, she’s far more content to sit there and watch him devouring the food – after all, he’d had only a few bites earlier before their argument – than eat much herself. He’s not paying any attention to her at all, instead focusing on something far in the distance. The only thing the direction he’s staring is a small pond, which is muddy and overgrown and doesn’t look like much. All the same, she’s sure his artistic eye has found something fascinating about it. Maybe the way the sunlight glistens off the water, or the small ripples from where a family of ducks splashes playfully by the bank. She finds herself drawn in by the simple beauty of it before long as well. It’s amazing how Jack never fails to identify something valuable in so many ordinary things. Even her.

“You gonna tell me what’s in there yet?” he asks finally, pointing to the bag at their feet. She blinks, shaking her head to clear her thoughts.

“I don’t know,” she muses, her eyes flashing mischievously. “Maybe you should find out for yourself.”

He reaches down slowly and pulls something from the paper. It’s a pack of pencils. He looks up at her, realization he’d been afraid to let in before dawning on his face.

“Are you serious, Ace?” he asks, staring at her with wide eyes. “Katherine? They said yes?”

She smiles at him, handing him the next item. He runs his fingers over the sketchpad like he’s never even touched one before, and for all she knows he hasn’t – after all, it’s nothing like the cheap rolls of paper so many of his other drawings were etched carefully onto, only to be stored in jars on his roof above the newsboy lodging house.

The last thing she bought is a thin leather bag that the sketchpad and pencils fit neatly inside, and when he sees that, he doesn’t even reach out to take it. He just shakes his head weakly.

“Huh-uh,” he says. “No way. You got me a job, pencils, and paper. And a temporary place to stay. I’m not taking that. What did I get you?”

“Breakfast. A job. Happiness.” It sounds cheesy but it’s so, _so_ true. He shouldn’t think he has to get her anything. She smiles up at him, and he reluctantly reaches out to accept the last gift.

“You really shouldn’t have done this,” he mutters, scowling sideways at her. “It ain’t right.” Yet he’s already reaching down to flip open the tablet, pulling a pencil from the case, making the first lines of a drawing on a clean white page.

She watches him move the graphite expertly across the paper for awhile, staring in awe as the disjointed slashes and shadings begin to come together to form a scene. Before long she can clearly tell that it’s Newsie Square. He hasn’t added any of the boys in yet, but she knows they will look spot-on when he does.

“So why’d they say yes?” he demands finally, looking up from the lines on the paper. “No offense, but I’m pretty sure they could do fine without you, and why anyone would want me . . .” He trails off uncertainly. Then she coughs, and he raises an eyebrow suspiciously. “What was that?”

“Um . . . They had a little encouragement from my benefactor?”

He shakes his head, laying the sketchpad down on the blanket beside him. The pencil rolls off the surface and to a stop on the blanket. “Oh. Does that mean your father?”

She doesn’t meet his eyes. “Well . . . yes. He was in the office when I arrived, letting the editor know he could give me my job back.”

“You’ve really got him wrapped around your finger, don’t you?” He snorts. “Wow. Must be nice.” He falls back onto the grass, staring into the canopy of leaves above them, unfinished drawing forgotten.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s still upset with me,” she says comfortingly. “I think he realized the same thing I did – I’d have to come home if I couldn’t support myself.”

“And that sure would complicate things,” Jack says with a wink, making her blush and turn away. He chuckles, running a hand across her cheek gently before returning to his drawing.

They decide somewhere around the same time that it’s time to go, standing up and beginning to gather their things. Jack slides his sketchpad into the bag, then helps her fold the picnic blanket small enough to neatly fit inside the basket.

“Jack?” Katherine’s voice is hesitant, uncertain. “Are you coming to my place again?” She doesn’t want him out on the street if there’s still a chance someone’s looking for him. Yet for some reason the question causes heat to rise into her cheeks.

He shakes his head slowly, a smile lighting up his face. “Nah,” he says, shouldering the bag purposefully and then sliding his hands into his pockets. “I’m gonna go home. I gotta tell the boys about this.”

She breathes a sigh of relief, and she tells herself it’s because the boys will be able to stop worrying now. She’s sure Crutchie hasn’t slept since Jack left. “Good,” she says. “It’s about time. Tell them I say hello, won’t you?”

“Sure,” he says. “Hey, Ace?”

“Yeah?”

His grin widens. “See ya tomorrow. At _work_.”

She gives him a quick kiss on the cheek before waving and starting off down the sidewalk. “See you, Kelly. Try to make it there in once piece. And make sure to keep your ego down so it fits through the door.”

She can make out his delighted chuckle even over the bustle of the busy streets around the park as she begins her walk home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> History note: According to ever-trustworthy Wikipedia, Paul Dana wrote for the Sun until he became editor in 1897, taking over for his father, Charles Anderson Dana. So I’m assuming he was editor at the time of the newsboy strike.
> 
> Just so you all are aware, the first chapter of one of my other stories – “Nobody But Each Other” – comes directly after this chapter. It’s not included here because it’s from Jack’s perspective, not Katherine’s like this is. It will be up shortly!


	7. Chapter 7

It’s beginning to rain again as Katherine approaches the newsboys lodging house, and she runs the last few feet to the door. She has to use all her weight to push it open, and she leans back against it once inside, catching her breath.

The room beyond the entrance is filled with newsboys, which she hadn’t noticed immediately because they’re acting uncharacteristically quiet. “I’m looking for Jack,” she explains once they notice her. “Is he here somewhere?” She searches the faces of the boys gathered, but he isn’t among them.

“I think he was on the roof,” Crutchie says finally. He’s sitting on a fat but ugly flowered sofa, his bad leg propped up on a chair arranged carefully in front of him. He swings it down and makes to stand, but she shakes her head, gesturing for him to remain sitting. “He yelled something about a drawing and ran up there as soon as we got back. If it’s raining, he should be down soon.”

“Thanks,” she replies, moving away from the door and taking a seat that’s pulled up next to the small fire going in the fireplace. The rain brought a chill with it, and she hopes she’ll dry faster here.

“So what’s going on around here?” she asks in an attempt to make conversation. She really hasn’t had the chance to talk to them much since the strike, and she’d forgotten how accustomed she’d become to seeing their faces every morning and listening to them joke and fool around as they began work each day.

Only silence meets her friendly inquiries.

“Come on, boys!” she says when she sees their less than enthusiastic expressions. “Am I destined to only come across you when you’re depressed and dejected? What on earth is wrong now?”

Specs pulls what looks like a spider off of his sleeve and flicks it under a table somewhere. Katherine watches it roll, then turns her gaze back to the boys. They appear to be deeply engaged in some sort of silent conversation, gesturing with their hands and conveying different emotions with their eyes.

“Seriously, though,” she says, getting slightly nervous at the silence and their forlorn faces. “Did something happen? Is someone sick?”

Race snorts and stomps away, looking vaguely disgusted. Crutchie tries to stop him with his crutch, but the bigger boy just shoves past and runs up the steps near the back of the room.

“Is someone sick? Yeah, Jack,” Romeo mutters finally, and her heart seems to stop in her chest for a brief terrifying moment. She just saw him a few hours ago, when he kissed her at the door to the Sun’s offices before heading to the editor’s desk for his first assignment. Then her mind works out what they mean and she starts laughing in relief. They’re just bitter he’s been spending so much time with her.

“Don’t be like that, boys,” she says once she can manage the words. “He hasn’t changed. He’s still your Jack.”

“Easy for you to say,” Mush says There’s a faint bruise forming on his forehead, as though he hit his head off of something. “You’re the one he’s changing for, to make you happy.”

Davey speaks up from a table in the corner where he’s huddled over a huge, musty-looking book. Katherine starts at the sound of his voice – she hadn’t even noticed he was there. He and his brother were spending less time at their parents house and more time with the newsboys lately. If anyone is changing, it’s them. “If by ‘changing’ you mean ‘becoming happy,’ well then yeah. Be nice. He's better off with Katherine.”

“Katherine makes him smile,” Les pipes up from under Henry’s chair, where he’s trying to coerce a mouse into a shoebox. He waves at her. “Hi, Katherine.”

She waves back halfheartedly.

“By ‘changing,’ we mean ‘getting dumb and breaking promises,’” Race’s voice echoes from the stairwell. He stomps back down before coming to rest beside Katherine, leaning on the wall next to her. “So thanks for that.”

“Oh, really,” she says, trying to reassure them. “He hasn’t been acting strange because of me. Now that the strike’s over and he’s not worried anymore, he’ll be back to normal.” She’s actually sure it’s the business with the Delancies that’s making him distant and protective of his friends, but she doesn’t want to bring it up if they don’t know. It’s Jack’s decision how he’s going to tell them.

Race opens his mouth, probably to retort doubtfully. But then a hush falls over the room, because Jack has wandered in, his bag still over his shoulder.

His face falls almost imperceptibly when he sees them, scowling and muttering to themselves. “What’s going on?” His eyes fall on Katherine, and he narrows his eyes at her questioningly.

“Nothing. Why?” Suddenly Race grins wickedly, throwing an arm over her shoulder. She resists the urge to cringe away – she loves the boys, really she does, but he smells strangely of mold and barnyard animals for some reason. “You jealous?”

“I ain’t jealous,” Jack says, only slightly too forcefully, his frown more pronounced now. He crosses his arms, looking between them as if trying to figure out the best way to pull her away. “I don’t own her or nothing. I just – Ace, you wanna see something? Up on the roof?”

And he thinks he’s so subtle. She smirks. “I don’t know . . .”

He glowers at her. She stares innocently back. Then Race retracts his arm rather abruptly and uses the momentum to shove her forward.

“Just go already,” Specs mutters from the corner. “You two are grossing me out.”

“We didn’t do nothing,” Jack protests, but the boys have dissolved into a mocking puddle of doe eyes and exaggerated kissing expressions. “Shut up.”

They don’t have to be asked twice to leave.

“So why’re you here?” he asks casually, stopping at a door to throw his bag inside before leading her up a creaky ladder to the roof. She shrugs.

“Just wanted to see you, I guess. Want me to leave?”

He snorts. “Uh, no. Not really.”

Smirking, she pats his head. “Somehow, I didn’t think so.”

The rain stopped as quickly as it started, and the puddles are beginning to dry in the humid air. The clouds are much less threatening now, with gold radiating out from the setting sun that’s just visible between the skyscrapers. A few birds fly carelessly in the distance.

The roof seems quiet even in comparison to the glum atmosphere of the room filled with newsboys, the noise of the city nothing more than a whisper at this height. Katherine sits on the edge, watching the people far below. Boys throw a ball back and forth, shrieking with joy as they stretch for a particularly difficult throw.

“Everything is perfect today,” she sighs. Jack smiles.

“Especially some things,” he murmurs, staring directly at her. She can feel his eyes even though she isn’t looking, and a blush creeps over her face.

“Seriously, though. I wish things could be like this all the time. Why can’t they be?”

Jack shrugs. “C’est la vie.”

Katherine raises an eyebrow in surprise. “You know French?” she asks suspiciously.

“Nah. Who knows French?”

She snorts. “Jack, I’m pretty sure that was–“

“Alright,” he interrupts, laughing at her frustrated expression. “I bummed a few drawing lessons off this French guy once. I was just sitting in Central Park, sketching, and he was horrified by my inability to draw hands. He said that all the time when he looked like he was giving up. I still ain’t exactly sure what it means. And I still can’t draw hands, either,” he adds as an afterthought.

She leans her head against his shoulder. “I can’t help you with the last one, but the phrase means ‘that’s life.’”

“Oh, so you know French?” This time it’s his eyebrow that inches upward, disappearing just beyond the fringe of his messy hair.

“I had this tutor once–“

“Of course you did.” His tone is weary, but jokingly so, she thinks– his grin is still firmly in place.

Katherine casts around for something to talk about in the silence that follows, but she can’t think of anything for the life of her. Everything seems dangerous, likely to turn Jack’s positive mood dark again. Finally she settles on a challenge, one she knows he won’t resent.

“I don’t think you’re as bad at drawing hands as you say you are.”

He looks at her skeptically. “Oh yeah? I promise you I am.”

“Prove it,” she says, smiling at him. He shrugs, and the two of them climb slowly down to the room where he left his bag.

It’s a sort of living room, with thick curtains on the windows blocking out the dying light. Jack turns on a lamp and immediately throws himself into a chair, paper and pencils already extracted from his bag. Katherine settles herself down on a plump armchair across from him to watch him work.

His expression is so intense she’s afraid to speak and break the focused silence, and she’s sure his charcoal lines are going come together in the best hands known to man, maybe even better than Michelangelo’s in The Creation of Adam. But when he turns the paper around with an “I told you so” expression on his face, it’s to show her the most awkward, sticklike, stiff fingers she’s ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on.

“Told you,” he says smugly, unnecessarily proud of his horrible drawing.

“Mm,” she says. “I see what you mean. But if you do this–“ she pulls the pencil gently from his fingers and adds a line connecting the fingers “–and this–“ she roughly lays in another “–you get a nice . . . Butterfly?”

Her modifications made it exponentially worse. Jack cracks up at the thick legs and uneven wings punctuated by fingernails. She can’t help but notice how he lays it carefully on the table beside him, though, making sure not to wrinkle it.

“Now I gotta draw somethin’ else,” he says once he gets his breath back. “Can’t have you thinking you did a horrible thing in getting me a job.”

“Of course not.”

“Go sit back where you were before.” He waves her toward the squishy seat once more.

She shakes her head. “Oh no. You are not drawing me.”

His eyes twinkle. “Of course not. It’s just that, that’s the only place you ain’t blocking my light . . . Now uncross your legs . . . Tilt your head. There.”

“Kelly,” she says warningly, but it’s an empty threat. She’d let him do whatever he wanted to her at that point. Even in her head that sounds weird, though. She resists the urge to shiver and tries to distract herself by studying the walls of the newsboys’ lodging house.

“Could you look any madder?” Jack asks, looking up briefly to criticize her expression. She sticks her tongue out at him, and then arranges her face into something slightly less pained. There aren’t any pictures on the walls, and the few frames that do hang there are filled by dull oil paintings of empty fields – certainly nothing that reflects the boys who live here. She’s glad when he finally lays the sketchbook on his lap, giving her the opportunity to study his picture.

“The pose of the body matches hers exactly. But it isn’t her staring up from the page. It’s Crutchie.

“You didn’t draw me.” She’s not sure whether she’s upset or honored.

“I ain’t a liar.”

She studies the drawing in awe. “How can you not draw a hand? You’ve got his face perfectly and he isn’t even here to look at!”

“You think I don’t know my boys good enough to draw them from memory?” His tone is a little hurt. She bumps her shoulder against his playfully, making him smile again. She certainly hadn’t meant it as an insult.

The boy’s eyes seem to sparkle with life from the paper, and Jack captured the hopeful quirk of his mouth perfectly. She’s not sure she could ever capture a person so closely with just words. Then a thought strikes her.

“Why did it matter what my face looked like if you weren’t drawing me?”

He grins. “Cause I like to look at you anyway.”

“Kelly!” she says, feeling the blush starting in her cheeks already.

“What?” he asks innocently. “I already told you, I ain’t a liar.”


	8. Chapter 8

In the days that follow Katherine barely sees Jack at all. Between the articles she’s been given at work – detailed, political stories that are nothing like the boring reviews she was once limited to – and Jack spending all his free time sketching cartoons of everything from Central Park to Governor Roosevelt (though nothing critical of him, of course) they’ve hardly spoken. She waves as she passes him with the boys in Newsie Square (the boys’ faces fall even as his brightens) and he’s stolen the occasional kiss as he passes her on her way out of the office and his way in, but beyond that, nothing.

Then, late Friday night he makes another appearance on her fire escape, grinning broadly as he catches her eye through her window.

He raps on the glass, even though she’s already noticed him, and waves at her. She smiles and abandons her typewriter easily.

“You doing anything?” he asks once she pushes up the pane.

“Writing an article,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him. “Why?”

He shrugs. “I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go for a walk.”

“Jack, it’s–“ she checks her clock “–ten o’clock at night! Besides, don’t you have something to draw?”

“Yeah, well, you can say no,” he mutters, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. Her heart twists at the disappointment on his face – does he really think she could refuse him? “But you can actually see the moon through the clouds for once, and there ain’t many people on the streets, and–“

“I’d love to go for a walk,” she interrupts, melting under his excitable attitude. He grins at her immediately.

She gestures for him to come inside, so that she can grab an umbrella just in case the seemingly perpetual rain returns, but he shakes his head and holds out his hand to her through the window. She swings her bag over her shoulder – maybe there’s somewhere still open where they can grab a snack before heading home – and lets him pull her up onto the grated metal ledge. Nervously, she clutches tightly to his hand as he leads her down the narrow ladders – she’s not sure how he does this in the rain, it’s slippery enough when it’s dry. But they make it down safely and walk out of the alley and down the main street, still holding hands, though not as desperately now.

“If you’re not drawing, shouldn’t you be spending time with the boys?” she asks, a little uncomfortable with how resentful they’ve become of her in the past week. “Surely they’ve seen you about as much as I have.”

Jack shrugs innocently. “They see me every day selling papes. Besides, they’re all getting on my nerves. They’re all either making fun of me, or talking about their own girls. Who they keep comparing to everyone else they’ve ever seen. And who I’m not sure even exist . . .” He trails off, shaking his head at his friends’ actions even as he smiles fondly.

“I can just see them sitting around arguing about that.” Katherine grins too. They’re like her own family now. “So why don’t I ever hear about other girls?” she asks teasingly.

He gives his stupid little half laugh, the one she’s steadily becoming even more in love with. “Come on, Ace. Why don’t I ever hear about other guys?”

“Because there weren’t any,” she says simply, evenly. Honestly. He snorts outright this time.

“Come on. Not even Bill Hearst? Or what’s-his-name, the other one?”

She smiles. “No, Jack. Bill and I are just friends. I’m not sure I’m really his type.”

“An’ he’s definitely not your type, if you’re with me now . . .” Jack blushes and looks away.

“No, he’s not my type,” she says, leaning closer to him. “Not even a little bit.”

Jack buries his face in her hair. They’ve stopped walking now – they’re far too close to be able to move forward freely anymore. But there are so few people on the street it doesn’t matter if they stand in the middle of the sidewalk, just holding each other.

“So who were the other girls?” she asks finally, looking up at him. This isn’t a jealousy thing – she just wants to understand him, to learn what she can about his past since he keeps memories of his time in the Refuge so carefully guarded.

His smile becomes slightly more forced. “You’re so convinced there was some?” He runs a hand along her arm, lowering his eyes. “Why ain’t you happy I’m here with you now?”

She laughs. “I am, Jack. I was just curious. You know, about who you hung out with before me, what the boys thought of her.”

“They definitely never met anyone else,” he says, his voice dark. She squints up at him, it finally clicking what he means.

“Did you even know their names?” she asks quietly.

He won’t meet her eyes, and that’s all the answer she needs. “I don’t know why this matters. It ain’t exactly a secret. I ain’t always been the charming upstanding citizen I am today.”

“No, you were a regular convict,” she agrees easily. He’s being so evasive – he must associate this with the darker part of his life. “Is this about the Refuge too? What _is_ it with that place?”

He shakes his head and turns away. “Let’s just drop it. Come on.”

He starts walking down the street again, but this time they’re not holding hands and the silence between them isn’t anywhere near as friendly.

“Are you okay?” she demands. He nods quickly, his mouth set, looking angry.

“Fine.” The reply is short and low.

“Look, I’m sorry I brought up the Refuge,” she says gently. “I just don’t understand that place, and I want to.” That’s when he snaps.

“Katherine, I’m sorry, but can you _please_ stop being a damn reporter for just this one minute? Please?”

She flinches at the harshness of his voice. He’s been so happy lately, and the circles under his eyes had almost disappeared along with the bruises of the past week. But as they pass under a street lamp she sees what she couldn’t on her darkened fire escape – his face is pale and drawn again, and it looks like he hasn’t been sleeping well.

“I can promise you, Ace. You don’t want to understand that place.” He’s almost yelling now, and he shakes his head, running a hand over his face and through his hair. “Just stay away from it. Please.”

She reaches for his hand, but he jerks it away before she can entwine her fingers with his. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something else, but then turns away roughly instead and walks quickly into the night.

“Jack,” she calls after him, her voice shaking slightly. “Please!” But he doesn’t turn around. She waits there on the dark street corner for awhile, her bag clutched tightly in her hands with the money she’d wanted to buy him food with safely inside. Then she too turns away, making for her apartment. He’ll come to her when he’s calmed down.

She hopes.

* * *

The footsteps behind her let her know she’s not alone.

She abruptly turns down an alley that isn’t the one by her apartment, quickening her pace and trying to lose her follower, but a shadow closes in on her.

“Hold up, Miss Plumber. Or, should I say Pulitzer?”

It’s one of the Delancey brothers. She whirls around, eyeing him coldly. She’s not sure what he wants, but she is sure it can’t be good, and she’s got half a mind to hit him now for what he and his brother did to Jack. Strangely, though, she’s relieved it’s him. At least it’s not some random mugger with a gun or something.

“Oscar? Or is it Morris?” Her tone is icy.

“Oscar,” he says, smirking.

“Well, let me tell you something, Oscar. You’re going to wish you were someone else if you don’t leave Jack alone.” There is fury in her voice, all of the pent-up frustration left over from her fight with Jack coming out. Threatening a Delancey is certainly a better way to vent her anger than bickering with Jack, though.

His smirk widens. “I’m not sure you’re in any position to be threatening me. You’re daddy ain’t too pleased with you or your new boyfriend.”

“He’s not my– My father is not behind this.” She’s still not completely sure of this fact, but it makes her feel better to say it out loud. “He knows when he’s lost, and he’s an honorable man. Those boys deserve what they got.”

“They sure do,” he says, grinning darkly. Katherine snorts in disgust.

“Well, this was a lovely talk,” she says sarcastically, turning on her heel. “Good day, Mr. Delancey.”

She doesn’t make it five steps before a firm hand closes on her upper arm. “Not so fast, Miss Pulitzer. I wanna ask you a couple questions first.” His grip tightens. “And I think you’re going to answer me.”

“Like hell I am.”

He clicks his tongue. “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” When she doesn’t respond to his taunt, he continues. “Where’s Kelly?”

“Santa Fe,” she says immediately. “He left after you _beat him up._ ” The last three words are said with such venom she’s honestly surprised he doesn’t recoil. She tries to yank herself free but fails.

“I know you’re lying,” Oscar says, maddeningly patiently. “He was seen coming out of a window at your place just this evening.” He sounds amused.

She ignores the suggestion in his voice and starts prying at his fingers with her nails. He doesn’t even flinch. “How do you know where I live?”

It’s not so much that he’s smiling anymore, but more like his teeth are bared. “I told you your daddy ain’t happy.”

“And I told you I don’t believe you,” she retorts.

“Don’t matter to me.” He pulls her against a wall as voices come into earshot, effectively hiding them from those passing the alley. “Now, tell me where Kelly is or don’t. We’re gonna find him either way. And when we do, we’re gonna make him pay for every foul thing he’s ever done to our employer – and to us. We’re gonna make him cry, we’re gonna make him bleed, we’re gonna make him sorry he was ever born–“

Exactly how they plan to do that, she doesn’t wait to find out. She lashes out with her bag, catching him in the side of the head. He recoils, and he yanks her arm with him, but by the time he recovers she’s managed to jerk free.

Oscar glares darkly at her, stepping forward. “I can assure you my father doesn’t want me harmed, whether he sent you or not,” she says with false bravado. She’s actually starting to become scared now. “Besides, you wouldn’t hit a girl, would you?”

“No,” he says bitterly. “I wouldn’t.” Then his leg kicks out, knocking her feet out from under her and sending her toppling to the pavement. By the time she looks up he’s gone.

That doesn’t stop her from running the whole way home.


	9. Chapter 9

When Jack perches on the fire escape outside her window, as she knew he would, she’s sitting on her bed examining her scraped knees. He takes in her skirt pulled up around her thighs and her exposed legs and looks like he might leave again. His face turns a dark red and he ducks his head away from her, stopping with only his fingers through the window.

Then he sees the blood. And once his eyes catch sight of the first of her injuries, it’s only a matter of seconds before they’ve moved to the finger-shaped bruises on her arm, which let him know something is wrong.

“What happened?” All traces of his earlier anger are gone, along with the embarrassed flush that flashed across his face moments ago. His voice is low and his mouth is set. He hesitantly moves forward through the window, reaching out like he wants to cradle her but stopping short. She doesn’t even speak, simply stares at him, and he knows the answer. “Delancies.”

The venom in his voice sends shivers down her spine. When he acts like this, he scares her more than a bully in an alley does, though certainly not for the same reasons.

She grabs for his arm, but he jerks it away. “Jack, it isn’t–“

“I’ll kill them. That’s it.” He’s fallen into full-blown self-loathing, wrapping his arms tightly around his middle and staring at her with wide and haunted eyes. “This is exactly why I didn’t want to come back. Ace. It’s all my fault they’re going after you now.” His eyes are shimmering slightly in the dull light of her lamp, and she wonders briefly if he’s going to cry. But he’s Jack Kelly. He doesn’t cry over what he can’t change. He goes out and changes it anyway.

“I’ll kill them,” he murmurs again, his words less harsh but with a frightening intensity that’s almost worse somehow.

“Jack, please.” She doesn’t want to see him get hurt again, and she knows she won’t be able to stop him from going after them if he decides he has to. “It’s not what it looks like.”

“Did they beat you up? Cause that’s a hell of a lot what it looks like.”

She grimaces at that. “Not– not exactly.”

She tugs her skirt back down to her ankles, ignoring the way his eyes follow the motion, and runs a hand through her knotted hair.

“You’re just saying that cause you don’t want me to get hurt.” His voice is suspicious, and he glances at her with narrowed eyes.

“No, I’m not.”

He laughs darkly. “I ain’t stupid. You’re scared I’m gonna do something that’ll put myself in danger from them. But they should have thought of that before they touched you–“

She’s getting desperate. Despite her injuries she gets up and crosses the room to sit on the windowsill, effectively trapping him in the room with her once more. “They’re looking for you; you can’t hand yourself over to them. Besides, Oscar didn’t start it – I did.”

She can tell by his raised eyebrow that he doesn’t believe her one bit. He throws himself into her chair and crosses his arms, wincing as his ribs are irritated by the motion. The dark shadows under his eyes are all the more noticeable now, and he looks exhausted. But he doesn’t give up trying to get the story out of her. Sometimes she swears he’s worse than she is.

“Ace. What happened?”

“I, um– I kind of hit him in the face.” She cringes internally at how unladylike that sounds. Not that Jack probably cares, but she knows she could at least put some effort into being respectable. Any other acquaintance of hers – not that she has many – would have been horrified by the show of force, though what they would have done in her place she has no idea. “With my bag.”

“You what?” He sounds shocked all right, but more proud than horrified. Her heart swells with appreciation at that tiny note in his voice. He leans forward in the chair, as if unsure he heard her correctly.

She shrugs uncertainly. “I was so fed up with the way they’ve been treating you that when I came across him, I sort of lashed out. The bruises are from where he caught hold of me, yes. But I was the one who pulled away and hurt myself.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

She shakes her head emphatically. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Jack. I don’t think they’ll be coming after me again.” She’s not sure this part is true – it’s more that likely that Oscar will return sometime soon with reinforcements to make her pay for besting him in the alley, and since he knows where she lives, she’s in that much more danger. But there’s no way she’s letting Jack see that she’s becoming more than a little scared of the thugs.

Jack’s eyes are incredulous, and he sighs and shakes his head. “You’re something else, Ace.”

“I’m sorry?” She offers the apology quietly, afraid of making him upset again. But he laughs, shaking his head harder.

“Don’t be sorry. S’not your fault. I guess I should apologize to you.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I did.” She blinks, and suddenly he’s much closer than he was a minute ago, out of the chair and standing just in front of her. His hands slowly rise to land on her arms, fingers dancing lightly over the bruises darkening the skin there. “I left you, and I wasn’t there when you needed me.”

She laughs nervously, thrown off by his nearness. “I upset you. I should stop bringing up the Refuge.” She cringes. “I just did it again. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her in a low voice, and she believes him this time. She leans back a little, not exactly trying to get away from him but definitely trying to increase the distance between their bodies until she can think straight again. However, it’s in vain. He just moves with her.

“Are you sure?” she breathes. But he doesn’t answer, just closes the distance between them, leaning down and drawing her lips to his.

She still isn’t used to this, and she backs away subconsciously, jerking to a stop as her back connects with her mattress. But he doesn’t let go, just walks with her, hoisting her onto the bed and moving closer to stand between her legs. She cradles his face in her hands, running her thumbs along his cheekbones. Then their eyes meet, and she lets hers flutter closed, blushing slightly.

Her skirt is considerably higher than her knees again, and his hands are on her hips under the fabric. He’s tense and hard against her, holding her close like he’s afraid to let her get even a small distance away. His lips separate slowly from hers and he starts to kiss his way down her neck, and she’s gasping for a breath like her lungs don’t remember how to work properly. She’s never felt like this before. She can’t believe the things this boy does to her.

Just as quickly as he approached her, he pulls away again, his hands lingering briefly against her skin before moving to either side of her on the mattress to support himself better. “Can I brush your hair?” he asks softly, abruptly, his breathing still uneven. She blinks.

“What?” She squirms beneath him, smoothing her skirt out hastily for the second time in as many minutes.

He grins at her, brushing a wayward strand of the subject in question out of her eyes with a deliberate, pointed motion. “What, you don’t think I can?” His whisper tickles her skin as he leans over her.

“Why do you know you can?” she squeaks out even as her heart speeds up again. Damn her stupid reporter instincts – she can think of several things they could be doing other than talking – but she’s really curious now. She doesn’t really expect him to answer anyway. But to her surprise, he does.

“There was this girl once,” he says, slowly raising his eyes to meet hers. She can read the lingering apology there, the peace offering. Her expression softens.

“Jack.” If he’s trying to make up for earlier with a story about some girl he really doesn’t want to talk about, he should know he doesn’t have to. She forgave him almost immediately. He doesn’t need to offer up secrets from his past in penance for snapping briefly.

He raises his hands to stop her protests, then picks up her hairbrush carefully from her dresser and moves to sit behind her on the bed. Running the brush gently through her tangled curls, he resumes speaking. “There was this girl once. It was two or three years ago, and she was about six years old – she was the younger cousin of one of the guys who was selling papes with us back then. She had to stay with us for a few days when her dad got into a little trouble with the law.”

Katherine smiles, both surprised and immediately content with the image of Jack and the other boys watching out for a little girl. “I’m sure you took good care of her.”

“We tried,” he says softly, moving further up a strand of hair, holding it near the roots so it doesn’t pull at her scalp. “We took her with us in the morning and shared our food and let her sleep in the good bed, the one by the window. An’ she seemed happy. But by the end of the first day her hair was a mess, sticky with food and getting in her eyes, and she wouldn’t even let her cousin brush it. She said it hurt, and she cried.”

“But she let you,” Katherine guesses. Somehow, it doesn’t surprise her at all. Jack nods.

“I distracted her with a story about Santa Fe, and by the time she realized I had the brush in my hand she also realized it wasn’t hurting, I guess. She let me do it for the rest of the time she was there.”

Katherine smiles, leaning back against him and forcing him to twist his body to reach the last few curls falling in front of her shoulder. She fits against him so neatly like this. “Well, you are excellent at it,” she admits, nestling back into his chest in a way that almost certainly puts knots right back into her hair. But she doesn’t care, and Jack doesn’t seem to, either. He can always brush it again later.

She doesn’t think he’s going anywhere for awhile, anyway.


	10. Chapter 10

She opens her eyes hours later, early in the morning, to a room that’s dark and chilly. The window is still open from Jack’s arrival the night before, and they’re both sprawled across the covers of her bed that were never turned down before they drifted off to sleep. She’s still in her thick dress – she was out before she could change – but she’s shivering anyway, goosebumps dancing up and down her arms. She turns to Jack, intending to gently wake him or push him to the side so she can slip beneath the blankets and go back to sleep.

Then she realizes it was the sound of his incoherent mumbling that woke her in the first place.

He’s curled tight against himself with his back to her, and he’s shivering as well, but she’s not sure if it’s from the cold or from something worse. His eyes move beneath their lids in his dreams, and he looks terrified, his face contorted in response to whatever it is he sees. She takes hold of his shoulder and gently shakes it, whispering his name.

“Jack?”

He burrows deeper into himself, shaking his head and gripping at the mattress with his fingers. It’s like he’s trying to get away from her subconsciously, like he can’t recognize her voice through the haze of sleep that surrounds him. Her heart breaking a little more with each whimper he lets out, she shakes him harder. No wonder he looked so tired the night before if he’s been sleeping like this for awhile. How did she not notice him slipping further and further away these days she’s been meeting him before and after work?

Finally her efforts get his attention succeed, startling him out of his nightmare. He jolts awake, gasping, looking around wildly with wide eyes. She reaches out for him, wanting to comfort him somehow, but before she can make contact he rolls off the bed to land on all fours on the ground. Coughing and gasping, he kneels there trying to catch his breath while she sits motionless on the bed, frozen and scared.

“Jack?” she whispers again when he’s gone quiet and limp on her floor. His only response is a faint grunt, and she slides off the bed to crouch beside him. His shirt is damp and sticky with sweat, and he presses his face into the blue carpet as if he’s hiding from her. When she reaches for him, he just shrinks away. “Jack, please look at me.”

It’s a testament to how truly exhausted he is that he does without a fight, staring up at her with a hard expression as if daring her to say something. She knows it’s an act – beneath the angry squint of his eyes is water gathering in the corners, and his shoulders are shaking despite his attempts to steady himself. But she doesn’t want to upset him further, so she remains silent.

Instead, she reaches out to him, taking hold of his arm and pulling him to her. They sit there for what feels like hours, him with his head on her shoulder, her with her hands in his sweaty hair, playing with the strands gently, pressing occasional tiny, innocent kisses on the top of his head. Eventually, he stops shaking, relaxes, leans into her more and lets her hold him tighter. Some time after that he raises his head to meet her eyes.

“Sorry,” he mutters in a rough voice. “You weren’t supposed to– I was gonna leave. Before I fell asleep.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, glaring. “Don’t you dare apologize, Jack Kelly. Explain to me what the hell that was, maybe, but don’t say you’re sorry.” She softens, cupping his cheek with her hand. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

She expects him to retreat, maybe making a run for the street or rolling over and pretending to go back to sleep rather than conceding to talk to her. What she certainly doesn’t expect is for his hands to come up to cradle her face, his eyes gazing seriously into hers as if he’s trying to reassure himself she’s still there.

“I just didn’t want that to happen,” he says softly, and she can’t tell if he’s still flushed from earlier or if he’s blushing. Probably a little of both. She nuzzles into the space between his neck and shoulder, trying to reassure him and give him a break from her staring.

“How long have you been having trouble sleeping?” she asks gently when she reemerges. “Jack, you should have told me you were having nightmares.”

“Bad dreams ain’t a big deal, Ace,” he says, and while she’s inclined to disagree, she doesn’t argue because she wants him to continue. “But that one – you was in that one.”

She blinks, shocked. “I was?” He dreamt about her? And bad dreams, at that?

He swallows thickly, nodding a little. “Yup.”

“But . . . Why?” She feels horribly that she’s the cause of this, even if she supposes it’s good he isn’t dreaming about the Refuge for one night.

“Must’ve been cause of what happened last night. Cause it wasn’t me getting hurt this time. And that – that was worse.” He ducks his head again, studying a spot on her carpet intently. She just sits there dumbly, trying to figure out what she ever did in her life to deserve Jack Kelly.

“I don’t want you to have nightmares because of me,” she says finally. He snorts.

“I have nightmares either way, Ace. After what I’ve been through. I ain’t ever getting away from them.” Taking her hand, he starts playing with her fingers. “And that’s okay.” He grins. “Things could be a lot worse.”

She’s convinced he’s only joking around to draw attention away from his earlier episode, and she’s not sure if she should let him or force him to confront whatever’s bothering him. She would really rather they get past this so he can sleep through the night and maybe regain a little bit of color in his face. “You dream about the Refuge other nights?”

His face darkens, but his voice is still even, like he’s trying to keep calm for her. “Yeah, Katherine. I do.”

She sighs. “Since you got out?”

“It went away for awhile,” he admits. “But lately – what with Snyder after me and Crutchie getting hauled there and the Delancies prowling around like thugs I used to know when I was locked up – it’s been getting harder and harder to keep forgetting.”

Suddenly a horrible feeling washes over her. “It can’t help that I keep asking you about it, either. Jack, I never realized – I didn’t know how badly what happened in there affected you. I’m sorry.”

He rolls his eyes slightly, like he can’t believe she finally realizes what he’s felt all along. Then he pulls her closer, and she knows he’s not really upset with her still. “I ain’t trying to keep secrets from you, Ace. I really just don’t wanna talk about it.”

“And I’m done asking,” she assures him. “I think I know most of it, anyway.”

He pales. “Huh?”

She shrugs. “I’ve been talking to people, for this article I’m writing. People who used to be locked up there. And what they’ve said happened to them, the things they talk about – a lot of it matches up with what you’ve said. It’s not hard to imagine the rest.”

He makes an awkward movement that’s half burying himself in her shoulder again and half backing away, which just lands them sitting side by side in a hug. “I didn’t want you to–“ he trails off. “I don’t know–“

“It doesn’t matter,” she tells him, her hands pressing into his back as she hugs him tighter. She can feel his spine beneath his skin and his shirt, and that worries her. She makes a mental note to force some food into him in the morning. “None of it matters. I love you.”

He laughs weakly. “I don’t deserve you, Ace. I really don’t.”

“Funny,” she says, “I was just thinking the same thing.” She smiles up at him, and he grins back. His eyes are still dark with fear and memories, but he’s definitely happier now, more at peace and accepting of the comfort she’s offering.

“So what now?” he sighs, running a hand through his hair to straighten it. She ruffles it again, messing it back up.

“I’m going back to sleep. You don’t have to, but I wish you would. I’ll wake you if it gets bad again.”

His skeptical expression melts a little, and she’s convinced he’s finally calmed down enough to actually rest. She’s sure he trusts her to save him from the nightmares if they become unbearable, anyway. Then a pounding sound echoes through the little flat.

Katherine jumps, before realizing it’s just someone knocking – albeit quite forcefully – at the door. Jack’s head snaps upwards, his face paling – the monsters of his past still aren’t far from his mind. Katherine presses a kiss gently to his cheek, then makes her way out to see who could possibly be calling at this hour.

A tiny part of her fears it could be the Delancies, coming to make her pay for her actions earlier or because someone saw Jack enter here earlier, but she tries to push that thought away. She breathes easier when she cracks the door open and sees Race on the other side.

Her relief doesn’t last long, though, because then she sees the expression on his face. It’s the kind of nervous apprehension that she’s seen all too many times, when someone knows something is wrong and has given up hope that it can get better. Jack, who has come up behind her, takes one look at the boy and grabs his arms.

“What is it, Race?” he demands. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Crutchie,” the boy stammers. “He wasn’t in his bed when we woke up. Nobody’s got a clue where he went. Jack, he – he’s just gone.”


	11. Chapter 11

“Thank God you’re here,” Race says. He’s calmed down slightly but not much, clutching desperately at the mug of cheap tea that Katherine pressed into his shaking hands. “We thought you was gone too, but then Romeo said he seen you leaving earlier, looking all happy. We hoped you’d be here, cause of that.”

Jack looks mildly embarrassed, refusing to meet Katherine’s eyes, then starts pacing again. “Did Romeo see Crutchie leave?”

Race nods nervously. “He said he figured he was just going to get you. I thought maybe he’d be here too. But–“

Jack shakes his head. “I haven’t seen him.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Katherine says, trying to remain optimistic. She’s rather alarmed that Race, who always acts so tough and sarcastic, has become so upset after only an hour without seeing Crutchie. “Maybe he’s meeting a friend. Maybe he’s found a new job. Maybe–“

Jack doesn’t say anything, but she can tell he isn’t buying it. She’s not surprised – so much about his life up to this point has been misfortune after misfortune, and it must be hard to stay hopeful. Race isn’t convinced either. “He can hardly even get up the steps anymore,” he mutters bluntly. “His leg’s been bothering him. Why would he be wandering around New York in the middle of the night? Something ain’t right.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. So where would he be, then?”

Only silence meets her question.

“Well?” she asks, frustrated by the lack of response. It’s not like sitting there is going to do anything for Crutchie. But Race is frozen with panic and Jack is dead tired, so she’s not sure she’s going to get much help. “Could he have fallen somewhere? Do you think he needs help? Why are you both so worried?”

“Delancies,” Jack mutters.

“Excuse me?”

Jack has crossed the room to stand in front of the door, clicking the lock open as he speaks. “What if he met them? They’re trying to get to me. Who knows what they’d do if they thought it would break me?” His voice is a solid octave above it’s normal range, and his eyes are wild. After his nightmares and his waking fears, this is too much. Katherine leaps for him, grabbing his hand and stopping him from vanishing into the night.

“It’s not always about you, Jack,” she says. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“I don’t wanna risk it, Ace,” he murmurs gently, prying her fingers from his. “I can’t.” And then he’s gone.

She and Race look at each other for a moment, their glances speaking volumes. Then she grabs her jacket and he smashes his hat down on his hair and they take off after him.

They catch up to him less than a block away, jogging to keep up with his brisk pace. “Do you even know where you’re going to look?” Katherine asks seriously, slightly breathless. “I mean, really. Where are you going?”

At that, Jack slows down. “Uh, I was . . .”

“I was thinking, too,” Race says, shaking his head. “I dunno where we should even start.”

Katherine rolls her eyes, handing Jack his hat that he’d left on her floor and taking his hand. “I know where we should start,” she says. Jack raises his eyebrow.

“Oh, yeah? How do you know where Crutchie would be?”

“I don’t, for sure,” she admits, shooting him a glare at his condescending tone. “But I think we should go to Newsie Square first. If Crutchie was anywhere around there and needed help, he’d go there to wait for the rest of the boys. And if the Delancies found him and wanted to get at you–“

“That’s where I’d be sure to go eventually,” Jack finishes.

Race stares at her in awe. “You should be a detective or something,” he says in a hushed voice.

“I’m a writer,” she replies. “That’s worse.” Then she frowns. “But I wouldn’t compliment me until we actually know if I’m right.”

“Touché.” Race nods, then darts ahead. “I’ll get the other boys and meet you there.”

Katherine opens her mouth to protest – she sincerely doubts that anything is going to happen even once they get to the square – but he’s already gone, yelling something she can’t make out behind him as he disappears around a building. She glances at Jack, only to find him staring straight ahead, his face set and determined.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” she murmurs. He shakes his head uncertainly, speeding up even more.

They make it to the square less than fifteen minutes later, when the sun is just starting to peek out between the buildings around it. Squinting in the light, they step up to the gate and grasp hold of the bars, straining their eyes to see into the shadows beyond. Jack forces the gate open just enough to slip inside, and she follows, pulling the thick fabric of her dress through after her.

At first, it seems as though everything is still. Then her eyes catch a flash of movement by the window where the papers are sold every morning. Jack notices it at the same time, looking up to see the faces of Oscar and Morris Delancey staring back at him.

“So it is you,” he says quietly. But Katherine isn’t so sure. They seem just as surprised to see Jack as he is to see them, if not more so. And they certainly don’t look as if they’re doing anything other than their job.

“Papes go out in an hour, Kelly,” Morris says almost civilly. “Take your lady friend somewhere else.”

“Where’s Crutchie?” Jack calls, ignoring him. “What did you do to him?”

Oscar arranges his face in a sickly sweet, sympathetic pout. “Did you lose your little crippled friend, Kelly? Maybe you should have kept him on a leash.” He chuckles darkly, flashing a humorless grin at his brother.

“You mean you haven’t seen Crutchie tonight?” Jack demands. The Delancies only laugh some more.

“If we had, we’d be bragging about it, not hiding it,” Morris says. “For once, Kelly, your concerns are groundless. We just got here.”

“And just in time, too,” Oscar adds. “Kelly and Pulitzer, after all this. Who woulda thought?”

Morris, who had disappeared from behind the window, emerges from the door to enter the square. “What exactly is the appeal here, huh?” he muses. “I mean, part of it’s obvious–“ he gestures vaguely to Katherine, looking her up and down in a way that makes her wish she was very far away “–but what does she see in you, Kelly? Does she likes boys who’ve been in jail? Is this some sort of rebellion against her daddy?”

“Come on, Ace,” he says, turning his back to the brothers. She wonders if it’s a show of bravery, or to hide the tortured expression on his face that she catches a glimpse of when he passes into a patch of sunlight. “We don’t need to listen to this.”

“I wouldn’t be so cocky,” Oscar taunts from his place safe inside the building. “Not with the things we’ve heard about you.”

“You don’t know nothing about me,” Jack snarls, his shoulders tensing. He makes the mistake of turning around, catching sight of their leering faces.

“We hear lots of things about Jack Kelly from guys who knew him in the Refuge,” Morris says loudly, as if to an audience. His hands go to his belt. “They ain’t so nice, Jackie-boy. Shall we see if any are true?”

Katherine grips Jack’s hand tightly to stop him from launching himself at the man, who looks more than capable of taking him out. Still, she can’t resist a threat of her own.

“Good morning, Mr. Delancey,” she says brightly with a dangerous undertone. “I haven’t had the pleasure. You’re brother, on the other hand – you should ask him about me sometime.” She tugs Jack backwards, toward the gate. They’re almost there when he stops abruptly, his hand ripped from hers. She looks back to see Morris holding onto the back of his shirt.

“We just gonna let him get away?” he asks his brother. Oscar shrugs.

“We ain’t supposed to do nothing now,” he says slowly. Katherine isn’t sure if she imagines it, but she thinks he casts her a nervous glance before turning back to his brother. Morris waves his protests away.

“It don’t matter if we rough him up a little bit. That won’t change anything.”

“That’s not what Snyder said,” Oscar begins doubtfully, but then he falls silent, looking dismayed.

Jack’s head snaps up. He narrows his eyes at the brothers. “Snyder?”


	12. Chapter 12

“Snyder?” Jack asks, his voice equal parts outraged and nervous. “Whaddya mean, Snyder?” He jerks free of the grip tethering him to the square and backs away slowly.

Morris looks at his brother with frustration clear on his face. “Now you’ve done it,” he mutters. “Blown our cover.”

Oscar scowls, looking annoyed but not apologetic. His shock at accidentally revealing the information is clearly gone. “Oops,” he mutters sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “Guess we betrayed some old guy in a prison cell.”

“I wouldn’t be so cocky if I were you,” Morris says. “Snyder may not be able to hurt us, but he has other guys who certainly can. If Kelly talks, it’s only a matter of time before they get you – and me, too.” He shoots his brother a dark look. “You’ve really done it this time.”

Oscar shrugs nonchalantly, but he’s fingering something in his pocket – from what Katherine’s heard, he never goes anywhere without his brass knuckles. She’s just lucky he didn’t bring them out earlier. “Guess we just have to stop him from talking.” The brothers lock eyes, and then turn their glares to Jack.

“You gonna talk, Kelly?”

Katherine looks at Jack, praying he’ll agree to be silent and walk out without a fight, but he’s staring at the brothers contemplatively. “I dunno, boys. What’s in it for me?” She groans internally, stretching for his hand. She wants to drag him away before any more harm can come to his thin, worn body and mind. But she knows he would resent that thought.

“Jack,” she hisses. “Let’s go.” He waves her away.

“Seriously, guys,” he says, shoving his hands deep in his pockets and tilting his head slightly. “The way I see it, the tables have been flipped. If I don’t run straight to Snyder, you agree to stop going after me and Katherine here.”

The Delancies snort, eyeing each other in disbelief. Jack has to realize how unimpressed they are by his demands. She glances at him, and notes that his hands are now out of his pockets and clenched in fists at his sides. So he realizes he’s making them mad.

She wonders if he’s trying to.

“We won’t say anything,” she says, linking her arm through his and practically dragging him away. “We promise.” But Morris darts around her and slams the gate closed in her face, effectively trapping them in Newsie Square.

“Wait a second. Ain’t you a reporter, Miss Pulitzer?” he asks, his tone anything but friendly.

She nods slowly. “Yes.”

“Then what’s to stop you from printing something about this in one of your papes?” Oscar comes around to stand beside his brother, clearly following the same train of thought.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Katherine says reassuringly, trying to sound more innocent by adding a non-threatening laugh. But it ends up coming out more wild and nervous, and she can tell neither of them believe her.

“You could get us in a lot of trouble, Miss Pulitzer.” Morris snakes out a hand, tugging at a lock of her hair. She tries not to recoil, staring at him straight in the eyes.

“Stop hurting Jack, and you have nothing to worry about,” she says confidently, trying to ignore the way Jack tensed up at the Delancies’ proximity. His fingers are shaking in hers, and she can’t tell if it’s from fear or anger. Probably both. She wants nothing more than to get away, for both of them. Until the strike, she’d never been in a situation like this before. Now it’s becoming more and more common, and that’s beginning to scare her.

Morris laughs unpleasantly. “Who’s really hurting him, Miss Pulitzer. Us? Or you? There’s no way the two of you could ever–“ His condescending monologue is cut off when Jack’s fist, the one that Katherine isn’t clutching, flies at his face.

 _“Jack,_ ” Katherine says as Morris stops to spit blood onto the ground, but she doesn’t get anything else out because Jack grabs her around the waist and flings her back away from the fight. She wants nothing more than to charge in and help Jack, but she knows he’s more likely to get hurt if he’s worrying about her as well.

For a moment she watches from the sidelines, biting her lip as the three boys take turns ducking and swinging punches. Then Jack takes a hit to the nose, and several more to his already-damaged ribs, and she decides she doesn’t care that he wants her safe. She runs forward, using all of her body weight to plow over Morris, who is standing over where Jack is now lying on the ground.

Oscar swings around, the brass knuckles nestled comfortably between his fingers. Katherine jumps to her feet and backs away, almost tripping over Jack. His eyes are closed, and she can feel her heart seize with panic.

And then the other newsboys arrive.

They flood into the square, Race and Romeo literally scaling the gate before Specs, Mush, and Henry manage to force it open. Elmer steps on Morris on his way in, and Finch and Albert have backed Oscar away within seconds. Katherine thinks it’s the shock that allows them to overpower the bigger boys – she’s never heard a group of the newsies this big remain so silent. Even she didn’t notice their arrival.

They aren’t quiet now, hollering at each other and bumping fists as they point and laugh at the Delancey brothers, who are several feet back and looking far less inclined to fight now that the reinforcements have arrived.

Romeo makes his way over to Katherine, offering her a hand. For what she isn’t sure, though, because she’s still on her feet. “You okay, Katherine?” he asks in his high, charismatic voice.

“I think so,” she says. She tries to step around him to get to Jack, who is now covering his face with his hands as though the daylight filtering into the square is giving him a headache. Romeo blocks her, his arms crossed since she refused his hand.

“Lucky we came to rescue ya, huh?” He gives her a hopeful smile, standing on tiptoe and raising his face to her. She ruffles his hair and pushes him teasingly away, smiling at the comical way his face falls.

“Lucky we came to scrape this idiot off the pavement,” Race mutters, nudging Jack with his toe fondly. He grimaces, pushing himself slowly into a sitting position.

“They was asking for it,” he says defensively, wiping blood from his nose with his sleeve. This makes the other newsboys laugh.

“Yup,” Specs says sarcastically. “You really showed them.”

“The looks on their faces when we came in was worth it,” Henry chuckles.

Mush sticks out a hand and Jack takes it, pulling himself upward. He looks around for Katherine, but she makes no move to get closer. In her opinion, the fight certainly wasn’t worth it, and she doesn’t think he should look so proud of himself despite the way his eyes are beginning to blacken already.

“Whatsa matter, boys?” Romeo calls to the Delancies. He’s moved on already, his face split into a wide grin. Katherine can clearly see how overjoyed he is to have a chance to come to the rescue of his hero. “Not so brave now, huh?”

“You’ll be lucky if we sell you lot any papes now,” Oscar mutters, ducking in the door after his brother and pulling it tightly shut behind him. The newsboys just scoff. The gates are already open, and it’s nearly time to begin the day, so they start lining up to get their papers despite the threat. Their relationship with the Delancies certainly is a strange one that defies definition.

Katherine notices Jack looking around, clearly searching for someone among the boys. She glances through the faces as well, but it seems one newsboy is still missing. And she’d been so convinced he’d show up eventually, unharmed and with a perfectly logical explanation as to wear he’d been.

She’s just turning back to Jack, about to try to stop the flow of blood coming from his face, when the boys all look up.

“Uh, guys? What’s going on?” A high, startled voice echoes through the square from somewhere behind them. Katherine whirls around and smiles.

It’s Crutchie.


	13. Chapter 13

“The hell have you been?” Jack calls through the blood on his face. Crutchie blinks at him, clearly alarmed by the violence he didn’t even see. He limps closer, squinting around at the newsboys as though trying to figure out what exactly happened.

“Jack? You’re– what do you mean?”

“You weren’t in your bed,” Jack says, dangerously calm. “Race comes runnin’ for me in the middle of the night, tells me you’re gone–“

Crutchie laughs nervously. “I was just– you’re never in your bed. An’ I go somewhere one night . . .” He trails off, adjusting his hat even though it’s already perfectly straight.

Jack stares at him expressionlessly for one long moment. Katherine can practically feel the other newsies holding their breaths, unsure of what his reaction will be. Then Jack shakes his head, cracks a smile, and runs for the younger boy. The momentum sends him crashing into Crutchie, whose legs give out, and then they’re sitting on the ground with Crutchie enveloped in Jack’s crushing hug.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that again, kid,” he mutters. Crutchie shakes his head, his ears red.

“I won’t.” Then he squirms out of Jack’s arms, scowling at him. “You’re squishing me.”

Jack’s smile grows even bigger, and he jumps up and hauls him to his feet. He dusts him off and wedges his crutch back under his arm, ignoring the boy’s protests. Once he’s steady on his feet, Crutchie pulls a crinkled piece of paper out of his pocket and wipes at Jack’s face with it, only to be pushed away.

“Just leave it. ‘M fine, kid.” Jack runs a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “So, come on. Where you been? All the boys want to know.”

“Yeah,” Race calls from the front of the line, hefting a big pile of papers up onto his shoulder. “We looked all over for ya, kid. Even started this fight for ya. Where were you hidin’?”

“I wasn’t _hiding_ ,” Crutchie begins, then trails off. He shakes his head, his mouth open but no words coming out, clearly trying to think of what to say. Finally, he shrugs. “I was just out walking around. Couldn’t sleep.” He makes eye contact with Jack, and though Katherine’s sure he isn’t telling them the whole story, Jack drops the issue immediately.

“Never mind that. Get your papes, kid. We gotta hit the streets.”

Katherine stands back as Jack steers him to the front of the line, slapping down enough coins to buy a decent-sized pile of papers for each of them. She follows the two of them out of the gates, and keeps after Jack when they separate at the next corner. He doesn’t seem to be in a bad mood – he’s still smiling – but he doesn’t look back to see if she’s with him, either. And that makes her feel cold inside.

“Jack!” she calls after him. “Wait up.”

He turns around, smile still in place, but it seems fake now. “Okay, Ace. Okay.”

She frowns at him, reaching for his hand. He moves a little further away, not letting her take it. “Is something wrong?”

“Should something be wrong?” He shakes his head. “Everything’s okay. Crutchie’s fine. We didn’t get crushed by the Delancies. Maybe they’ll stop now.” He laughs, high and also fake.

“Jack, you know what they said wasn’t true.”

He snorts. “Yeah, the Delancies are a bunch of stinkin’ liars. Trust me, I know. But Snyder– who knows about that?”

She reaches for his hand again, shaking her head, and this time he lets her take it. “I mean, about me. About us.”

“Oh.” He falls silent, tracing little designs into her palm.

“I just thought you might be worried because they think this isn’t real. Hell, everybody’s probably waiting for me to leave, to go back to upper-class parties and boring suitors and my father’s good graces. But I’m not, Jack. Don’t let them bring doubt into this.”

“Oh,” he says again. Finally, he looks at her, if only briefly. “Nah. I trust ya, Ace.”

Even if there’s a hint of nervousness in his voice, even if he looks away right after he says it, she still feels better. “I’m not going to hurt you, Jack.”

“If you can help it,” he murmurs. And to that, she doesn’t have a response.

“Look,” she says, pointing across the street at an unfamiliar newsboy to change the subject. “The _Sun_! I have another article out today!”

Jack stares at her for a minute, then smiles, accepting the new topic of conversation. “Is that so? Guess we’d better buy it, then. Show the boys an’ all.” He reaches into his pocket, but she swats his hand away.

“I can get it, Jack,” she says. “You don’t have to–“

“I want to,” he tells her seriously. She can see him getting more excited about the idea. “I can afford it. An’ we’ll be helping out some other newsie, too. So everybody wins.”

She lets him drag her across the busy street, and opens the paper the small boy hands them to the page where her name is printed in bold near the bottom. It’s not a very important article – she’s still working on her big one, about the Refuge – but it’s not something in the society pages, either. And she’s ridiculously proud of it.

“There it is,” she says, pointing to it. “It’s about some election. Not very special, but–“

“It’s great, Ace!”

“Do you think so?” She skims the page briefly – long enough to notice a few of her sentences have been changed, though even that doesn’t ruin her mood – then hands the paper back to Jack. “I’ll admit, it’s nice to have my name somewhere that people outside of housewives will actually see.” He nods, leaning back against a nearby building to read.

“Plumber,” he mutters, almost unconsciously.

“Excuse me?”

He blinks at her, blushing. “Back in Newsie Square, they kept calling you Pulitzer. But you’re Plumber, Katherine Plumber. My Ace. You ain’t nothing like your father.” He buries himself behind the paper again, face still red, leaving Katherine staring at him in silence.

She’s not entirely sure how to take that. Regardless of what her father has done or the fact that she’s never been particularly close to him, he’s still her father. She still feels like she owes him basic recognition of that fact – after all, he raised her, gave her food and clothes and roof all those years. She’s not going to forget all of that just because he doesn’t get along with Jack.

That said, she knows Jack meant it as nothing more than a compliment. He was just letting her know that he doesn’t associate her with the selfish, monopolistic attitude of the man who is largely responsible for the fact that he and his friends slept of the streets for years. He trusts her, despite who she’s related to and what others say about her. And she’s grateful for that, because God knows he doesn’t have to. He could have walked away the second he found out who she was, the moment the Delancies reminded him that they’re playing with fate just by being together. But he didn’t. He’s still here.

“Come here,” she says suddenly, tugging the newspaper away from him.

“Why?”

She laughs. “Because I want to kiss you, but you still have dried blood all over your face. So I’m going to get it off.”

“And then you’ll kiss me?”

Nodding, she pulls out her handkerchief and starts gently dabbing at his nose. “That’s a definite possibility.”

“Okay,” he says, grinning, and for the most part, he stays still until the brown stain is off his face. He leans toward her just as she’s finishing up, but she pushes him back and he freezes, pouting slightly. When she tucks the handkerchief back into her pocket, she grabs his shirt and pulls him down to her level.

“Now it’s okay,” she says. And then she doesn’t say anything else because his mouth is on hers and his body is pressing her into the wall and her lungs are burning but it doesn’t matter because she and Jack are together and everything else will work itself out. She forgets that they’re on a busy street in the middle of the city. She forgets that Snyder may want Jack and his friends to suffer for their roles in the strike. She forgets everything but the feeling of his mouth and his hands on her.

The sound of very loud throat-clearing causes her to pull away, blushing. She may be becoming less conventional in terms of her reporting and her actions since meeting the newsboys and deciding to rise up and take control of the century she’s started calling her own. However, she’s well aware that there are still social rules she’s supposed to follow in public, and she’s basically blown them all to dust today.

She releases Jack quickly, her eyes going from his face immediately down to her shoes despite his hurt expression. But she catches sight of the throat clearer before her eyes are fully lowered. And her heart drops heavily into her stomach.

It’s her father.


	14. Chapter 14

For a moment she stands there numbly, praying that her brain can come up with a story, any story, to get her out of this. But then it hits her that she doesn’t have to make excuses anymore, that if her father has a problem with the way she choses to live then they have nothing more to say to one another. She turns on her heel and starts off down the sidewalk at a brisk pace, dragging a very sheepish-looking Jack behind her.

“Katherine Pulitzer, this is not how I raised you.” She hears the voice echo above the rest of the bustle of the street, but she doesn’t turn around. For so much of her childhood, that exact tone had told her what she was absolutely not permitted to do, had tried to convince her that her dreams were meaningless. It gives her great satisfaction to walk away now, even if there’s an ache forming in her heart she can’t entirely explain.

“Don’t look back,” she hisses as Jack appears to be slowing down. “I just can’t deal with this today.”

“You are better than this, Katherine!” Her father sounds further away now – they’re losing him. “I thought it would take more than a filthy street rat to make you forget that.”

She tenses up at the insult, but the street rat in question seems like he couldn’t care less. He looks like he’s torn between wanting to laugh and worry over how she’s going to react. She shakes her head at the unspoken concern in his eyes and simply pulls him faster down the street. When they finally duck into an alley a few blocks away, it’s as if the dirty brick walls are shielding her from her father’s judgmental glare.

“Well, that went well.” Jack’s voice is both apologetic and amused, but there’s a genuine note of concern for her underlying the other emotions.

“I’m sorry. He didn’t have to make a scene.”

“Should we – I don’t know – go back?“

She laughs bitterly. “Of course not. Don’t worry, he won’t blame you. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ll be written out of his will by this afternoon.”

Jack gives her a sideways look, and she tries to arrange her face into something more composed so he doesn’t worry. Apparently she succeeds, because he shakes his head and sighs. “Nothing scares you, does it, Ace?”

“What do you mean?”

He waves his arms vaguely around, struggling to put the idea into words. “The Delancies, chasing crazy stories as a reporter, disagreein’ with your father – you ain’t scared of none of that. Doesn’t even make you nervous.”

“Sure it does,” she replies easily, shaking her head. “And I’m scared of plenty of other things, too.” When he raises his eyebrows questioningly, she frowns, trying to figure out how to explain herself. “You know. Normal things.”

He scoffs. “Oh yeah? What’s ‘normal things’?”

“Oh, what every girl’s afraid of. Being forgotten. Not making a difference in the world. Not being missed once they’re gone. That sort of thing.”

Jack shakes his head, affection plain in his clear blue eyes. “I don’t know much about girls like you, Ace, but I don’t think that’s what they’re afraid of.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Uh huh. I think they’re afraid of not getting married to some rich guy and not living in a fancy house that compares to their neighbors. I think they’re afraid of their hair turning gray and their figures filling out. An’ boys like me, we’re afraid of not having anything to eat or somewhere warm to sleep, an’ that’s about it. But you? None of that even makes you flinch.”

“The idea of you not eating makes me flinch,” she says quietly, but he waves her concern away.

“You know what I mean. If you didn’t have money to eat, you wouldn’t even blink, you’d just make it work. You’re only scared of silly things, like not being important when you already are.” He takes her hand gently, making it all too plain just how important she is to him.

“I’m scared of other things,” she murmurs softly, almost too quietly for him to hear. But he does.

“Like what?”

“Losing you.”

Jack lets out a little giggle, then tries to cover it up with a cough. “You nuts, Ace? Why would you worry about that?”

With that simple question, the insecurities that have been piling up since strike come tumbling out of her mouth. “I’m not beautiful – hell, I’m not even pretty. And there’s that – I don’t talk like a lady. My fingers are always stained with ink, because I _work_ , and I can’t even cook toast! My father hates you already, and the boys are getting tired of me, and– I just– what do you see in me? Seriously, Jack?”

He pretends to study her thoughtfully for awhile.

“Somebody told me ya don’t write half bad.”

“Jack–“

“Hang on, I’m still thinking. You’re a damn good kisser, too.”

A tiny smile comes over her face. “You think so?”

“Yup.” He nods seriously. “An’ folks can count on you to be honest, and to do anything for your friends, and don’t you ever say you ain’t beautiful again because you look like an angel, Ace. You do.”

His eyes widen at her then, because a few tears begin slipping through her lashes at his words. She cringes because she knows he’s realized exactly how much the encounter with her father has shaken her now. She sniffles weakly and tries to turn away, but he swings her toward him and she ends up with her face pressed into his chest instead.

“Ya know, there’s somethin’ my old man used to tell me.”

She wipes her eyes on her sleeve and looks up. He never talks about his father – he’s really got her attention now.

“He used to say, ‘God don’t make garbage.’ Any time somebody was sayin’ somethin’ about us, or one of our friends – somethin’ bad about how we didn’t have no money or family – he’d just say that, ‘God don’t make garbage,’ and I’d just think of God sittin’ up in the clouds dreaming up a person like me. Thinkin’ about how he wanted every part of me to go. Now, I don’t have much experience with church, but that ain’t so far fetched, is it?”

She shakes her head, a smile turning up the corners of her mouth despite her best efforts to remain melancholy. “I like it a lot. He seems like he was a very sensible man.”

Jack snorts, turning away, and she knows the moment is over and his past is locked away again. “Yeah, well. That’s what I thought, too.”

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. She’s not sure what she’s sorry for, exactly, but she knows that Jack’s issues with his father are probably a whole lot worse than her own.

“I’m sorry too,” he says teasingly, making eye contact again. “Your dad is a hell of a bigger problem than mine now.”

Katherine sighs. “Sorry about that, too,” she says. “But you can’t choose your family.” She’d take Jack over Pulitzer any day, and she hopes Jack knows she means that. But he shakes his head emphatically.

“God don’t make garbage,” he says again. “Even ol’ Pulitzer’s here for a reason, Ace. He gave me you.”

This time when she kisses him, they aren’t interrupted.


	15. Chapter 15

She storms into the lodging house the next afternoon in a less than pleasant mood. She’d been up typing late into the night working to finish her article – she’d only gone to bed once the fatigue and writer’s block had gotten so bad that she wanted to launch her typewriter out the window – and her morning had been even worse. The door slams behind her and several of the boys flinch, heads jerking upward to identify the cause of the commotion.

“Jack ain’t here,” Race mutters tiredly from his perch on the stairs.

“I know,” she responds curtly. “I left him at the office.”

Albert, who is sitting on the floor bouncing a ball off a sleeping JoJo’s knee, squints at her curiously. “You two fighting?”

“No,” she sighs. “He was just – a little off today.”

Crutchie looks down at his hands twisted in his lap. Specs rolls his eyes, and Race snorts.

“He’s always a little off. It’s what you get for having big dreams and a small brain in New York.”

Katherine shoots him a glare, evidently not upset enough with Jack to stop defending him. “Anyway, that’s not why I left.” She flops down on a chair, pulling the pins out of her hair as she leans back. The boys watch her curiously until she glares at them again and they turn back hastily to what they’d been doing before she arrived.

There’s silence for awhile, until Romeo sighs. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why’d ya leave?”

“Because you’re more professional than the idiots in that office.” She stares pointedly at Mush, who’s using a stick to scratch between his toes. He blinks up at her with a sleepy expression on his face. “And that’s saying something.”

“Aww,” Race says, making his way down the stairs. He skips the last four, landing with a thud on the dusty ground by her feet. “Was someone mean to ya, Plums?”

She lets him put an arm around her, because she knows he’s just trying to help, even if she would rather push him away and pace and rant. “Mean I could handle. Mean would be _nice_ , at this point. It’s the bigoted, narrow-minded, chauvinistic–“

“That’s a lot of big words, Plums.”

“Bigger than they know, too,” she mutters snidely.

“So what?” Romeo asks, face scrunched in concentration as he struggles to understand. “They ain’t letting you write something?”

The look on Katherine’s face makes even Race take a step back. “Oh, no. They let me _write_ it. I’ve been working on it for over a week. But it’s too _soft_ – they need a _male_ perspective. So now, mine’s been scrapped and they’ve given it to someone else.” She leaps to her feet, throwing her arms in the air. “Some _man_ waltzes in today with half a column about how the _newsboys_ upset the balance of the city and somehow it’s better than my complete disclosure of Snyder’s injustices!”

“That ain’t right!” Finch says angrily.

“Damn right it’s not.” She huffs angrily. “It’s always going to be like this, isn’t it? Nothing I do is ever going to matter.”

“Course you matter, Plums,” Mush says, pulling his shoe back on and scooting his chair closer to hers. He sticks his hand in his pocket, making it jingle. “Listen. I got money in my pockets an’ I can afford to buy the guys somethin’ to eat now. That’s all cause of you.”

“But it isn’t enough!” She sees their hurt faces and tries to explain herself. “It was a start, sure. But just think how many others are out there right now in the kind of shape you boys were a few weeks ago! They need our help too! And if I can’t get printed again–“

“There are other ways to help people,” Romeo tells her encouragingly. “You can give people old socks or buy papes from other newsies.”

“An’ they’re gonna realize sooner or later what they’re missin’ not having your stories in the papes,” Race says. “They’s more nuts than we thought if they don’t beg for you to come back.”

“They’re businessmen,” Specs adds reasonably. “Seeing as your articles got the most publicity in this whole city these past few weeks – they’ll come around.”

It makes her feel better to hear the boys so defensive about her writing. She’d known they’d be supportive – after all, her articles had made all the difference for them. And that is important to her – nothing feels better than seeing their faces grinning back at her, a little rounder now that they’re eating. But there’s still room for so much improvement . . .

“Hey Katherine?” Crutchie’s quiet voice sounds from the doorway – he must have gotten up and left, though she hadn’t noticed. “Can I talk to ya for a minute?”

She tells the boys she’ll be back and walks quickly to the hallway. “What’s wrong?” Something about his voice made her very nervous, and with the amount of bad news she’s been receiving lately . . .

Crutchie stares at her, eyes wide and intense. “Don’t say you don’t matter, Katherine. Please. It’s thanks to you we eat, thanks to you Snyder ain’t prowling around no more, thanks to you Jack ain’t standing at the edge of the roof every night–“

“I know, Crutchie,” she says soothingly, not letting herself think too deeply about that last statement. She pats his shoulder gently. “I realize that. I’m sorry, I was just upset–“

“It’s okay,” he adds quickly. “I ain’t mad. I just wanted to make sure you do know.”

“I do,” she smiles. “Don’t worry.” She winks at him. “I know you boys couldn’t function without me.”

He grins briefly, but then his face resumes its serious expression again. “Can I tell you one more thing?”

She nods. “Sure.”

“It’s my fault Jack’s upset again.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure it’s nothing – he’ll get over whatever it is.”

“I went to the prison to see Snyder.”

Her hand falls from his shoulder, where it had been resting comfortingly. “You–“

“I went to see Snyder locked up in his cell, an’ I drew a picture of it so Jack could see too. I wanted him to feel better that Snyder ain’t gonna get him. But when I showed him last night, he got upset, an’ –“

“I don’t–“ Katherine has no idea what to say. It’s such a characteristically Crutchie thing to do, trying to bring comfort to Jack in any way he can, even at the expense of his own safety and comfort. But Jack’s response is also typical – of course the idea of Crutchie prolonging his exposure to that man would leave him confused and afraid.

“I just wanted to help.”

“I know you did,” she assures him. “And I’m sure Jack does, too.”

“Did it seem like–“ Crutchie falls silent suddenly, and Katherine turns around to see Jack standing in the doorway. She hears the uneven thump of a crutch scraping across the floor, and when she looks back over her shoulder, Crutchie is gone.

Jack crosses the room to shut the door behind him, then turns back to her. “He saw Snyder, Ace.”

“I know. He told me. Just now, actually.”

She studies Jack’s tired face, reading the worry written in every line. She wants to kiss the lines away, to make it so they never come back, but she knows he cares too much and has too little for that to ever really succeed.

“I told him it was a crazy thing to do. Goin’ to that place – the Refuge was bad enough.” He’s rambling, his voice soft and his thoughts scattered.

She sighs. “It was his decision, Jack. He isn’t a little boy. He wanted to do it, for you.”

“That’s stupid,” he mutters. “I didn’t need–“

Katherine shakes her head. “He could tell how upset you’ve been,” she says. “Even _I_ knew about the nightmares, and I don’t live here! You can’t blame him for wanting to make it better.”

Jack’s face screws up at her words, uncertainty and guilt written all over his expression. “Why would he– I’m not worth–“ He turns away, unable to say anything else, but she gets what he means.

“Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. Don’t blame yourself.”

“It’s my fault, ain’t it? For having the nightmares, for gettin’ Crutchie thrown in there – they’d have it so much better without all that.” The look on his face breaks her heart. She can’t stand it when he looks like that – she has to make it better.

“Of course not. Remember? God doesn’t make garbage,” she murmurs, sliding her arms around his waist. She can feel him smile against her hair.

“Okay, Ace.”

“I’m serious,” she says forcefully. “What will it take to get you to realize that?”

“Just hold me?” he asks hesitantly, and her arms tighten. His own come around to meet behind her back in response, and he clings to her as if she’s the only thing holding him upright.

“Okay.” And she does. And she does everything she can to suppress the idea beginning to form in the back of her mind, because she knows whatever it may achieve isn’t worth the effect it will have on Jack.

Is it?


	16. Chapter 16

She holds Jack through the night, and it doesn’t make her feel any better about her plan.

He arrives on her fire escape close to midnight, pale and sweaty even though it’s cold and windy outside. He’s twisting his newsboy cap in his hands, and refuses to meet her eyes.

“I ain’t planning on makin’ this a regular thing,” he apologizes the moment she pushes the window open. “I just – the roof is cold – an’ the boys don’t need–“

“You know you can come here whenever you want,” she tells him honestly, both because she doesn’t mind at all and because she’s already trying to make up for something she hasn’t even decided she’s doing yet. She’s not sure she _can_ do it – it feels an awful lot like being forced to pick between Jack and her job. What kind of a terrible person must she be for even considering it?

He rolls into her bed without protest, eyes closing almost immediately, and she curls up beside him like it’s normal because it’s become so, after only a few nights. She lets him pull her close, and his warm breath tickles her throat. When the rise and fall of his chest slows as he falls into sleep, she dares to hope that it may be an easy night. But of course it isn’t.

The muttering in his sleep is more panicked than she’s heard it yet, and he tosses and turns and cries out all night. She knows it’s because of the Refuge, because of what Crutchie did, maybe even because of their conversation about his father. Everything about his past sets off the nightmares, it seems. She holds him close, cradling his head against her chest and whispering to him, wondering how she could have ever considered making it worse. She should be doing everything she can to make this boy happy – God knows he deserves it.

But then she imagines the reception her article could get, and starts planning all over again.

She leaves before he’s awake the next morning, careful not to wake him, and ends up in the last place she ever thought she’d go – her father’s office.

Of course he’s already there – to Joseph Pulitzer, nothing is more important than his work. But it seems that by showing up, she’s managed to surprise him.

“Katherine?” He shakes his head, quickly returning his attention to the coffee he was mixing cream into. “I do hope you’re here to apologize.”

“Um, no,” she says unapologetically, not sure which particular insult he wants an explanation for but not intending to give him one regardless. “I actually want a job.”

He doesn’t bother to disguise his snort of disgust. “I believe we’ve made it perfectly clear that we don’t want to be connected to one another in any way. I trust you understand my frustration with your behavior in the public eye, and I am well aware of your opinion of my employee practices.”

“Yes,” she agrees easily. “We don’t exactly get along anymore, do we?”

Pulitzer sighs, leaning back in his chair. His glasses are already immaculate, but he removes them to polish them on the corner of his jacket anyway. “Indeed. What would your mother say?”

It’s easy for Katherine to picture the exact face her mother would have made in a situation like this. She snorts. “She’d have told us to grow up and then locked us in the study until we promised to behave.”

“And we’d have sat in opposite corners of the room glaring into space and listening to your sisters play that blasted fiddle. Once we stopped being stubborn, we’d pretend to get along just so she’d let us out.” As her father speaks, she can feel herself transported back to that musty room, with the dark wood and the piles of books and the big desk with the old typewriter she’d always dreamed of using. She’d loved that room. Time spent there, especially time with her father, had never really been a punishment.

“And you’d have the key in your pocket the entire time, but you’d let me think you didn’t so that you’d get a hug once we won.” Katherine smiles sadly, jealous of her younger self all of a sudden. Everything had been so simple then. Before death, before separation, before work.

She seems to complicate everything these days.

“And you’d dash downstairs and start pounding away at the piano to drown out the fiddle, and your mother and I would smile at one another, and I’d remember why my daughters were worth the fights and the noise,” Pulitzer adds, taking a casual sip from his mug.

“Lucille wasn’t half bad at the fiddle,” Katherine says defensively. Her heart seizes a little at the compliment disguised in her father’s words. “Edith, though . . .”

“She’s still convinced she can play. At the Christmas dinner you didn’t attend, she took it upon herself to provide the entertainment. Even her husband left the room.”

“Oh, God,” Katherine laughs. “That must have been awful!”

Her father sighs, shaking his head. “Many things about that dinner were _awful_ , as you put it.”

“I know, Papa. I know.”

Pulitzer finishes his coffee and stands, walking around his desk and coming to a halt before her. It’s suddenly all business again, his tender expression replaced by a serious one. “What kind of a job, Katherine? I was under the impression that you didn’t want special treatment.”

“And I don’t!” she reassures him quickly. “But they’re not printing my article in the _Sun_ because I’m a girl, and I’d like to think you run the _World_ a little differently.”

“Because I’m known for my open-mindedness?” The sarcasm is plain in his voice. She’s sure he’s making fun of her, but she goes on anyway.

“Because it’s a good article,” she says flatly. “And I have an idea that will make it even better. But I’m going to need to borrow the carriage.”

She explains it to him, and when she’s finished, he looks intrigued. “You can leave at dusk,” he says finally, eyebrow quirked in appreciation.

Somehow, she’s managed to impress Joseph Pulitzer after all these years.

* * *

She can’t bring herself to face Jack at all that day, so she doesn’t go into work at the _Sun_. It’s not like she would have anything to do, anyway – with her article about the Refuge tabled there, she’d either be sitting around all day, or they’d give her another flower show to review or something. So she hides out in Pulitzer’s office, avoiding the eye contact of his reporters and methodically editing drafts of her article on her own with a bright red pen while she waits. It gives her great satisfaction to ignore most of the edits she’d received from the _Sun_.

She eats lunch by herself, then spends the afternoon writing and rewriting various interview questions. There’s a delicate balance between hostility and still managing to elicit a response that she tries to maintain, and it takes multiple drafts before she’s happy with her work. She tries not to think about what will happen if this doesn’t succeed. She tries even harder not to think about what will happen if Jack finds out where she’s about to go.

As soon as night falls she leaves.

Her father must have sent word ahead, because there is a guard waiting at the entrance to show her to the cell. She follows him down the stone passageways into the depths of the prison slowly, wondering for the hundredth time if she’s doing the right thing. The only light comes from flickering torches, casting eerie shadows on the walls. She draws her jacket tighter around herself and clutches her notebook tightly to her chest.

“Warden Snyder, first cell on the right, ma’am,” the guard says, his voice higher than she’d been expecting. He can’t be more than twenty years old. Barely older than her, and look where he spends his nights. Is it out of necessity, to provide for a family? She wonders if he’s happy. She wonders how many people there are in New York, in the country, who are forced into difficult work situations simply because they have no other choice.

Fueled by anger from that thought, she strides around the corner toward the cell. And stops short. Someone is already there, face glowing in the flickering torchlight, staring at the cell’s single occupant with exhaustion and anger in his eyes.

It’s none other than Jack Kelly.


	17. Chapter 17

Neither of them say anything, and for a moment she dares to hope that she can slip out without drawing attention to herself. Maybe Jack didn’t notice the guard. Maybe he still thinks he’s alone with the source of his nightmares.

“Crutchie was right.” Heart sinking, she knows without question that he’s addressing her. She steps forward sheepishly. “He does look much less threatening in there, doesn’t he, Ace?”

It’s a good sign that he’s still using her nickname, she thinks, but she still doesn’t speak. Her notebook is tucked under her arm, forgotten, and she barely even glances at the man in the cell. A job isn’t worth it if the price is their friendship. What was she thinking?

“I followed you to your father’s office this morning,” Jack whispers, his tired eyes catching hers briefly in the darkness. “I decided I’d surprise you, like you was gonna surprise me.”

“Jack, I didn’t want to–“

“It’s okay,” he says, and there’s no anger in his voice. He smiles at her briefly, and she can see that while he’s obviously upset, he’s not actually mad at her.

For the thousandth time, she realizes she doesn’t deserve him.

“How did you get here?” she demands. He shrugs.

“I walked.”

Of course he did. While she was sitting in her father’s office, hiding from him and going over the same few questions in her battered notebook, he was wandering through the streets of New York alone and in the rain. She cringes.

“It’s okay, Ace,” he murmurs again. “Seriously. It’s okay.”

“Well, isn’t this a lovely little reunion.”

They’ve finally gained the attention of the man in the cell.

Katherine starts at the voice. She’d built Snyder up to be some sort of horrible monster in her head, and as such, she’d imagined his voice would be loud and rough. But the one that comes out of his mouth, while it does make her skin crawl, is silky and clipped. Professional. Clinical.

Katherine can hardly suppress her hatred enough to get out a full sentence. “I’d be lying if I said it was a pleasure, Mr.–“

“I knew you’d show up after that crippled boy did, Kelly.” Snyder speaks over her as if she wasn’t even there, and she falls silent, fuming. Of course he’d be the type to talk over her and act as though her insight doesn’t matter. “It’s just like you criminals to gather around the damage you leave like maggots.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve always been predictable.” The insult rolls off of Jack like it doesn’t even affect him. He takes her hand and squeezes it, and she forces herself to take a deep breath. “That was my downfall, wasn’t it?” He looks at Snyder pointedly. “And yours.”

“And who is this you’ve brought with you?” the man in the cell continues, finally looking at her. She can’t help but notice how he doesn’t meet her eyes, though. He doesn’t speak to her, either, talking over her to Jack instead.

“I’m Katherine P–“ she begins, but Snyder has already moved on.

“I’ll admit I’m surprised you’ve found yourself better company than those other street rats. But I’m sure she doesn’t know the full extent of your crimes.” He pauses menacingly. “Or your punishments.”

“ _She_ doesn’t care!” Katherine explodes, hating the look he gives Jack and the shudder she feels run through Jack’s body in response even more. “So you can lay off him.”

“I’d be more than happy to share the details with her. She should know what kind of scum she’s consorting with, run back to her family and doubtless long line of wealthy suitors while she has the chance.”

His words are eerily similar to those of the Delancies earlier – she wonders how much he actually knows about her, how much thought he’s put into determining what will cut Jack the deepest. Staring at his pale face leering through the bars at them, she feels physically sick. Coming here was a mistake.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” Jack demands, voice breaking. He swallows thickly. “Even in here, with nothing, you still think you’re better than me. Why is that?”

“Jack–“ Katherine reaches for his arm, but he waves her away.

“I gotta do this, Ace.” He smiles gently at her, though his eyes are dark, and turns back to Snyder. “I just want you to know, that if our lives woulda been different, our places coulda been reversed. There’s no rule that says I had to be the worthless kid and you had to be the big guy with the money and the power. When it comes down to it, you an’ me are exactly the same.”

Snyder has the audacity to look amused, his hooded eyes narrowing coldly in response to Jack’s speech. Katherine briefly wishes he weren’t in a cell; she wants nothing more than to hit him.

Jack shakes his head slowly. “Except I’m better.”

His whisper is so quiet that Katherine almost misses it, and even then she isn’t completely sure of what she heard. It’s as if he’s talking more to himself than to the others in the room. Then he opens his mouth again, starts to say something even more powerful, and she realizes the opportunity she has.

She pulls out her pen and begins to record.

“Look at you,” he says, his voice growing stronger. “You had so much – hell, the government was givin’ you money for practically nothing – and you wasted it all on yourself. I ain’t got nothing – most nights I can’t even afford a bed – and I reckon I’ve helped more kids than you ever even thought twice about.”

Snyder is now facing the wall, his face expressionless. She can’t tell if it’s because Jack’s words are affecting him, or just because he doesn’t care to be bothered by their trivial complaints anymore. She strongly suspects the latter – he doesn’t look like a repentant man. Despite the lack of attention, Jack goes on.

“I fight for the kids you liked to beat up. Got beat up myself a fair share of times, for what it’s worth. But because of that, I’m surrounded by friends, who at least starve with me if they can’t stop me from starving, and who have you got to bail you outta this place? Nobody.”

“Ever hear of Joseph Pulitzer, Mr. Snyder?” Katherine steps forward, and he finally looks up. Jack moves backwards, letting her take over.

“Obviously.”

“You answer some questions for me, and he’ll see what he can do about reducing your sentence.”

“Wait. What are you _doing_?” Jack hisses, but she elbows him.

“Is that a deal?” she asks firmly, asserting her control. Snyder may not like it, but she has the power now. He narrows his eyes, but nods after a long pause.

“What have I got to lose?” he asks sarcastically, sneering at her. Ignoring him, she clicks her pen and begins questioning him.

She takes down notes quickly, feeling nauseous at his callous recollections of the boys in his care and his unfiltered anger at being imprisoned. As soon as he speaks his last word, she turns on her heel and pulls Jack out of the room without a glance behind her. As the light of his cell fades in the distance and the corridor grows so dark she can barely make out Jack’s figure beside her, she breathes a sigh of relief.

“Reduce his sentence? What the hell, Ace?” A panicked accusation is the first thing out of Jack’s mouth.

“Would you calm down?” she says, scowling at him. “I was bluffing, obviously. But I’ve got what I need, and if you’re good . . .”

Instead of answering, he kisses her.

“What was that for?” she splutters when she regains enough brain capacity to pull away. Not that it wasn’t nice, because it was. But she’d expected a bit more hostility, considering what they’d been through before they’d met here.

He shrugs, and it’s too dark to know for sure but she strongly suspects he’s blushing. “I needed that.”

“A kiss?”

“Stop it, Ace.” He laughs breathlessly, his breath tickling her shoulder. “Crutchie was right. I needed to see him in there.”

“You shouldn’t have seen him like that,” she says apologetically. “I should have told you what I was going to do–“

“But it was for the best,” he says. “Funny how things have a habit of working out since I met you.”

This time it’s Katherine who blushes as they make their way back to the entrance.

Jack holds the door open for her, but she doesn’t walk through immediately. “One more thing,” she tells him, turning to the desk. The secretary behind it looks up.

“May I help you, miss?”

She nods, suddenly businesslike. “If two men by the name of Delancey ask after Mr. Snyder, they’re not to see him,” she informs the bespectacled man. “You can contact Governor Roosevelt if you have any questions.”

Something about her tone must convince him of her credibility, because he nods meekly as she slips away into the night, Jack close behind her.


	18. Chapter 18

“Well, that’s that.”

It’s hours later, back in her flat, and the lamp in the kitchen is burning low. Jack jerks his head off the table at the sound of her voice, blinking around before focusing in on her face.

“You done?” His voice is groggy with sleep. He’s been out for at least an hour.

She nods, biting her lip. The coffee at her elbow is only half gone, but she isn’t the least bit tired. “With the first draft at least. I don’t know. I think I’m happy with it.”

Jack smiles at her, his grin lopsided. “I know my opinion ain’t much, but I’m sure it’s great.” He pulls her cup toward him, taking a sip and making a face at the cold, bitter drink.

“Want to read it?”

Running his fingers along the edge of the page still in the typewriter, Jack frowns slightly. “You want _me_ to read your article?”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “You’ve probably been reading papers longer than I have, Jack Kelly.” Ignoring the skeptical noise he lets out, she pushes it across the table toward him. “Let me know what you think.”

“Do you want me to, I dunno, change stuff?” He glances at her uncertainly. She can’t tell if it’s because he doesn’t want to offend her or because he’s not sure she wants his advice, but either way, it’s cute.

“Sure,” she says easily. “Let me know what needs fixed. I’d do it myself, but I think I’m a little biased.”

“Yeah, I might be biased too,” he mumbles, but there’s a pleased flush spreading over his cheeks at being asked to help her with something so important.

With nothing better to do, she watches his face as he reads. Initially she’s interested in his reaction, and it makes her smile to see his eyes light up at a particular phrase or idea, but eventually her attention is turned to simply admiring his features. How the dark circles under his eyes are less pronounced now that he’s had a long nap at her kitchen table that was uninterrupted by nightmares. How his eyebrows quirk upward cockily even when he’s not flirting. How the little scar on his cheek, probably a souvenir from a stay at the Refuge, brings out his boyish grin.

“Hold up,” he says suddenly, making her jump and snap her eyes away from his face before glancing slowly back. He’s squinting at the text suspiciously. “I’m in here.”

“Do you mind?” Suddenly, she’s not sure that was the right thing to do. “Everything you said was so inspiring back there, I thought other kids who’ve dealt with Snyder would benefit from seeing it. Not to mention, this is essentially a follow-up of my strike article, and you are the face of the strike, so . . .”

“I don’t _mind,_ ” he says slowly. “I just – I ain’t –“

“Trust me, Jack,” she assures him, reading easily into his doubts. “People want to read about the famous Jack Kelly. You literally brought New York to a standstill; to the kids, at least, you’re a hero.”

“I ain’t nothing of the sort,” he mumbles, going back to the article, but the stupid grin stretched across his face doesn’t fade.

“So? What do you think?” she asks impatiently when he finally puts the final sheet down. He runs his fingers through his hair, shaking his head; that makes her inexplicably nervous. “What?”

“It’s good, Ace,” he says, and she breathes a sigh of relief. He stands up, stretching his legs. “Damn good. I bet the _Sun_ ’ll be kicking itself when it prints, yeah?”

She shrugs modestly. “I don’t know.”

Rolling his eyes at her expression, he ruffles her hair on the way to the pantry. “Come on. You’re gonna be real popular over there, for awhile at least.”

“You know what?” she says, watching him pull out a container of something, sniff it, and then hastily return it to the shelf. “We should print some more of the drawings with it. There might still be people who didn’t see the one from the Banner, and they’re so powerful–“

“Are you for real?”

The grin she flashes at him is equally playful and hopeful. “All front page articles need a picture to go with them, after all.”

“Oh, of course,” he laughs, finally finding something that looks like cookies and setting them down on the table in front of her. “We should celebrate.”

“With my food? Are you sure that’s safe?”

He points to the name of the bakery around the corner stamped on the packaging as he takes a bite. “We’re good. I checked.”

They finish at the same time and stare at each other for several moments in sleepy silence. “Well.” Jack’s hands flap uncertainly for a moment, then he shrugs and half turns away. “Guess I’d better be gettin’ back to the lodging house. Have to be in the square in a couple hours anyway.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Jack Kelly,” she growls, pointing him down the hall. He smirks a little, like that was the answer he was hoping for, and leads the way to her room.

They lay mostly side by side, except with her head pillowed on his chest. He holds her close, fingers pressing into her sides, but she thinks he’ll sleep okay tonight. Snyder is too securely behind bars to slink into any nightmares for awhile.

“Today was a good day after all,” she breathes into his shirt. His hands stop drawing their little patterns across her back as he thinks about it.

“You know what, Ace? It was.” He sighs, his breath ruffling her hair. “Maybe all this is finally over. Maybe we’ll get some peace.”

She smiles against him, listening to the beating of his heart. She’s sure this is too good to be true. With them, it’s only a matter of time before something else happens. But things are finally looking up, and she’s going to enjoy it while it lasts.

* * *

It’s starting to rain as she flies down the steps of her father’s building several days later, but even that doesn’t dampen her spirits. The paper sporting her article – her _front page_ article – is clutched in her hand, and she rolls it up and slides it into her sleeve to stop it from getting ruined by the drops.

Part of her – a very large part – wants to immediately drop it on Dana’s desk at the _Sun,_ so her editor can see that Joseph Pulitzer thought her article was good enough to run. On the front page. She’d love to see what his stupid boy writer covering his own version of the Refuge would have to say about that.

But she hasn’t seen her boys in a few days, and she knows their reactions will probably be all the more positive. So she turns left and heads down the back streets leading to the Newsboys’ Lodging House instead. The sky is dark, and the streets are empty, but she isn’t worried. The rain should hold off a few more minutes at least.

“We heard you went to see our boss, Miss Pulitzer.”

She stops cold at the sound of the voice just behind her, but doesn’t turn around – she doesn’t want to give Oscar Delancey the satisfaction of knowing he startled her. “It’s Plumber, actually,” she says levelly.

“It ain’t your name that’s important,” his brother reassures her nastily, roughly grabbing her arm. She jerks away, trying to get loose, but she isn’t strong enough. The entire situation feels like a strange sense of deja vu, but there’s a more threatening undertone that wasn’t present during their last alleyway confrontation. “It’s the names of the people who want you safe that we care about. Although I guess it’s Plumber that really threw Mr. Snyder under the bridge today . . .” He trails off menacingly.

Suddenly the article in her sleeve doesn’t seem like such a blessing after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only a few chapters to go! If you've stuck it out this long, I'd love to know what you think! Comments are what inspire me to keep writing! xo


	19. Chapter 19

They force her into a carriage that’s far too nice for boys of their social standing, and it speeds off immediately through the streets of the city. She sits stiffly, staring out the window to avoid making eye contact with either of the Delancies. They don’t speak either, except to say a few short commands to the driver.

“You don’t mind if we make a quick stop, do you, Miss _Plumber_?” Oscar asks her finally, breaking the hostile silence. His voice is mockingly polite, and she resists the urge to shiver. “We got someone we need to pick up.”

She gives no indication that she heard, and notices the tightening of their fists in response to her silence. Maybe if she continues, she can drive them to make a mistake.

The carriage rolls to a halt in a dark street across town from the lodging house, and after a few moments, she recognizes it. They’re just down the block from the prison she and Jack visited less than a week earlier. Suddenly there’s a rapping at the carriage door, and as the Delancies open it with twisted smiles on their faces, her stomach sinks.

When Snyder steps into the carriage and settles himself on the seat next to her, she’d be lying if she said she was honestly surprised.

“That was a very clever thing you told the guard when you visited, Miss Pulitzer,” he says in his silky voice. “It’s a pity he was on our side all along. And believe me when I say, Roosevelt will not stop us again.”

She wants to tell him he’s wrong, that good always wins in the end, but she knows her voice would shake and doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. And there’s a part of her that isn’t so sure anymore. Nowhere does it say she is guaranteed a happy ending.

Though she’s never seen the outside of the building they arrive at next, she recognizes it from the stories she’s heard thanks to her article – the Refuge itself. It’s odd that Snyder brought her here, she thinks – it was the seat of his power once, but it was also where he fell. But the building is still empty, never repurposed after the Refuge was shut down and the boys sent home, so she supposes it’s an appropriate place to leave a hostage.

A hostage who just so happens to be her.

She is led through the dark halls and up several flights of stairs. There are no lights in the building, and if she focuses, she can make out the sounds of rustling in the walls – the rats that appeared in Jack’s pictures, she assumes. The glass is missing from many of the windows, and there’s a terrible draft.

“Is this beneath you, Miss Plumber?” Morris asks as he drags her roughly around a corner. Ahead of them, she can see Snyder smile cruelly. “Or do you feel right at home? After all, those newsboys are basically scum from this place.”

She stomps on his foot, which gives her temporary satisfaction, but he pinches her arm and forces her away from him with his powerful grip.

The room they finally stop in is small and dank. Snyder lights two candles on a small table, which illuminates the peeling wallpaper and scuffed floor. She jerks free of the Delancies’ grip, but there’s nowhere to run. Snyder leers at her, his face dark and threatening.

“She’s yours, boys,” he says, slipping back into the hall and pulling the door shut behind him. “Do what you will.”

* * *

“It ain’t that we want to hurt you, exactly,” Oscar says when they’re alone, though his tone doesn’t exactly support his words. “This is strictly business.”

“Business?” She arches an eyebrow, not content to remain silent anymore. She doubts this can get any worse regardless of what she says; on the other hand, maybe words have the power to save her now. “Like Snyder’s really in a position to help you? Open your eyes, boys! He’s a fugitive now! You’re aiding a criminal that escaped from prison!”

“He’s already done more for us than your father ever has!” Morris snarls. “I’m sure it’s never crossed your filthy rich mind, but it ain’t exactly easy making a living in this city.”

Katherine snorts. “You’ve been following me for weeks; you know where I live. I’m well acquainted with the lower class way of life lately.”

“An’ if it doesn’t work out you can just go running back to Daddy.” He’s holding on to her again – his fingers squeeze painfully tightly at her shoulder. She looks to his brother appealingly, but Oscar just grabs her other arm and drags her across the room.

“Look,” he says slowly. “Just cooperate and this will be easier for you. We get Kelly, Snyder’s happy, and we get our jobs and our money and move on with our lives.”

She notices how he doesn’t include her fate in that plan. Not that she’d ever agree to anything where Jack is a casualty, anyway. Surely they must know that; she doubts they care.

“What did he promise you?” she asks quietly. “You’re willing to risk going to prison for the rest of your _lives_ just so you can have a little more money in your pockets?”

Morris approaches too quietly to hear, and she doesn’t see the hand coming until it’s already connected with her cheek. She stumbles backward, head reeling, as he clenches and unclenches his fists.

“Our mother is _dying_ ,” he hisses in her ear. He grabs her hair and jerks her upright. “We can barely afford food, let alone a doctor or medicine.”

Five minutes ago she would have been sympathetic; now she stares at him levelly with a cold expression. “I’d imagine it’s hard for your family without your father’s income, after you _beat him up_ with the other trolley workers.”

If Oscar hadn’t grabbed his brother at the last second, she imagines she wouldn’t be conscious much longer. As it is, he manages to lash out at her side, leaving her winded and tearing her sleeve as his fingers catch in the material.

“For that,” Morris growls, teeth clenched, “this is gonna be extra painful for you.”

She sets her jaw and meets his eyes. Whatever it is, she can take it. She’s not naive – she knows what they’re capable of – but she’s strong. Nothing matters, as long as Jack and the boys aren’t here.

“You can watch the light leave Kelly’s eyes,” he whispers, and her heart nearly stops. He aims a final kick at her, knocking her legs out from under her, and leads his brother into the hallway. She can hear their chilling laughs long after the door is closed and locked behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter of Nobody But Each Other comes directly after this, before the next chapter.


	20. Chapter 20

“The damn door is _locked.”_

Katherine wakes sore and sticky – one of her injuries must have started bleeding while she slept on the cold, hard floor – to the sounds of someone kicking the door. Though the banging doesn’t help the headache that she’s starting to get, her heart soars immediately.She blinks slowly, her eyes adjusting to the fact that it’s now much darker than when she closed them. She really hadn’t meant to fall asleep here.

“Jack?” she calls in a hoarse whisper. The noise stops abruptly.

“Ace, you’re in there? Oh, thank God. Ace, I’m right here. We’re gonna get you out.”

“How, exactly?” Another voice – Race, she thinks – sounds nearby, skeptical and impatient. Their voices are high and thin, like they’re out of breath and scared. “They’re gonna find us, Jack–“

“I dunno,” she hears Jack mutter quietly. She forces herself to her feet and starts to painfully move toward the door, wishing she hadn’t fallen asleep on the floor. She’s slowly remembering exactly how bad it is for the boys to be here, and wants them – Jack in particular – as far away from the Delancies as possible. “Ain’t you ever broken into a place before?”

“Not somewhere that was locked up. Why, have you?”

Jack lets out a deep breath of frustration. “Nah.”

Leaning back against the doorframe to take some of the pressure off her bruised body, Katherine quickly works several of the pins from her hair and shoves them under the door. “Will these help?” she asks slightly sarcastically, knowing full well that they will. “I’d have done it ages ago but there’s no keyhole on this side–“

“That’s great, Ace,” Jack says, his voice sounding relieved. “Perfect. Just hang on, gimme a second . . . Ouch, dammit!” The doorknob rattles, but nothing else happens. “Hang on, sweetheart, I’m tryin’.”

She’s not scared anymore, though; not for herself, anyway. But if the way their rescue plan is going is any indicator, they’re certainly not ready for the fight she fears is coming. “You two are the worst criminals I’ve ever met,” she murmurs fondly. If only they hadn’t come . . .

“We ain’t criminals, just misunderstood,” Jack protests, though it’s muffled like his tongue is between his teeth in concentration. There are a few seconds of silence, then a triumphant whoop, and finally the door swings open.

Race shushes Jack – equally loudly – on his way inside the door, brushing past Katherine and coming to stand in the middle of the room like a conqueror claiming his land. Jack enters a little slower, almost apprehensively. Then he sees Katherine and stops dead. He takes in the blood running down her cheek and her torn dress and pales, half reaching out to her and half afraid to get any closer.

“Did they – did they touch you?” he asks slowly, finally stepping forward and wrapping his arms around her more gently than he ever has before. “Ace, what happened? I swear to God, if they hurt you–“

“I’m fine,” she tells him automatically, hugging him back briefly and then pushing away. Her face leaves a little smear of blood against the pale blue of his shirt, and she cringes, but in the scheme of things it doesn’t matter. She grabs his hand and starts to pull him toward the door, the Delancies’ earlier threats playing back in her head. “Race, come on. Can we just go? We shouldn’t stay here, we don’t want them to find us–“

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.”

The Delancies’ silhouettes appear out of nowhere to block the entire doorway, seeming even larger than they really are due to the flickering candlelight they carry with them. One of them – Oscar, she thinks – steps forward into the room, setting the lamp down and putting his hands on his hips.

“Well look what we have here.”

Morris comes to stand behind his brother, taking in the scene in the room with a mocking smile on his face. “Mr. Snyder is going to be real interested to see this, that’s for sure.”

“Listen, gentlemen,” Katherine says quickly, desperate enough to try anything to avoid someone getting hurt. “There’s really no need for this. If you let us go to my father, we can get you the money you need by tomorrow afternoon–“

She cuts off, scowling, as Jack pushes her behind him.

“Recognize this place, Kelly?” Oscar asks, ignoring her completely. Jack doesn’t look around in response, doesn’t try to identify their location, but Katherine can see right through the toughness and knows that it’s an act. The tension is practically rolling off of him in waves. She hopes it’s not that obvious to the Delancies – they’re already feeding off of all the discomfort present in the room.

“Nah, he wouldn’t,” Morris says, taking a step closer. “He wouldn’t want to. So let me remind you, Kelly. Snyder says this is where the bigger boys would drag you off to–“

“Shut the hell up,” Jack says dangerously, though she thinks he might be shaking now. “Just stop right now–“

“What’s the matter?” Oscar asks. “Bad memories?”

Katherine eyes the room where she’d been locked again, seeing it now in a completely different light. This is where Jack had been beaten, broken? This is the place where he was trapped in his nightmares?

“I wonder if you screamed,” Morris muses, gazing through the window nonchalantly. Jack’s fists tighten. “I’ll bet you would – you sure ain’t the toughest guy I’ve ever seen. Miss Plumber certainly did, didn’t you darling–“

The idiot is trying so hard to start a fight, latching onto whatever twisted insults he knows will provoke Jack the most. She sends a kick in his direction, but he manages to step away in time, mostly because she has to grab Jack and hold him back.

“Never,” he hisses through clenched teeth, “never say–“ But she buries her face in his shoulder and holds him close, and he calms down enough to turn away.

“Come on, Race,” she says, motioning the younger boy over. “Time to go.” If they can just get out of this room, they have a fair chance of running to the exit. As long as Jack and Race have eaten in the past twenty-four hours, she knows they’re fast. But they don’t get the chance.

“Unfortunately, no,” another voice – a low, silky one – murmurs threateningly. Katherine doesn’t even have to look toward the doorway to know that the person framed in it now is none other than Snyder. “I can’t allow that when I’m so close to getting what I want.”

“And what is it that you want?” Katherine demands immediately, squeezing Jack’s hand tight. “What could you possibly want with a bunch of poor kids when you could be getting far away from here, making sure you aren’t caught and thrown back in prison?” She hates to even think about him not being returned, but it’s better than imagining her newsboys hurt – or worse.

“It’s really quite simple,” Snyder says, moving uncomfortably close to her and running a hand down her cheek alongside the cut. Jack goes to slap him away, but he catches his wrist in mid-air and holds it there. “All I want is to, how would your newsboys say it? ‘Even the score’ here. They took away my job, my reputation, my life – it’s only fair that I get to take something from them as well.”

He suddenly brings Jack’s hand down in a rough, jerking movement, and Jack yells in pain. Then all hell breaks loose.


	21. Chapter 21

Technically she didn’t _start_ it, Katherine will argue later. Snyder started it by hurting Jack.

But she sure as hell does cause it to escalate.

She can immediately tell Jack is hurt worse than he’d ever admit by the way he’s cradling his arm to his chest, so she takes matters into her own hands and lashes out at Snyder. The Delancies jump forward to pull her away, dragging her backwards with bruising grips on her upper arms, but not before she manages to kick the bastard firmly in the knee and the stomach. She’s never been happier to see a man double over in her life.

At the angry cry Snyder makes when her feet connect, though, the door opens once again and more figures move in. They’re no one she recognizes, but they’re about the same age as her and the boys and their clothes are ragged and stained, so she figures they’re on Snyder’s payroll as well. There are only six of them, but she, Jack, and Race are still dangerously outnumbered. They spread out around the periphery of the room, and Snyder moves quickly behind them.

“You didn’t honestly think I’d come here without reinforcements, did you?” Snyder asks scathingly. “As if I’d entrust my life to idiots like these two.”

Tired of being abused, the Delancies are clearly through with being gentle, assuming they’d been taking care not to hurt her too much before – they jerk her away towards the window and slam her against the wall. She winces, catching sight of the brass knuckles glistening brilliantly in the dim light – but Race launches himself at them before the fist can connect, drawing their attention away.

Oscar flings him easily aside, his head cracking back against the floor, and Morris aims a couple of kicks at his middle just for good measure. Aside from letting out a weak moan, the boy doesn’t move. Katherine stifles a new cry each time she hears the thump of thick boots hitting his body – she knows an outcry of horror would only make it worse.

She is sure without looking that this is more than Jack can take, and so his loud protest doesn’t come as a shock. “Hold up, hold up,” he yells, raising his hands – one of them turning purple – into the air. “There’s no need for that. We ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

The Delancies smirk at each other and move to stand by Snyder, but they don’t put the brass knuckles away. “That’s what we’re saying.”

Jack looks at Race worriedly. “You okay?”

He receives only another moan in response. Katherine crouches down beside Race, wishing she knew how to do something useful like check his pulse and making a mental note to befriend a doctor and learn.

“Look, Snyder,” Jack continues, swallowing thickly. “You do whatever you want with me. Keep me here, I don’t care. But please, _please_ , let Katherine take Race away.” He looks his nightmare dead in the eyes. “You know, I hear the prison sentence for murder is even longer than the one for fraud. Nobody wants that.”

“Tell him I ain’t gonna die,” Race mumbles, his words slurring, as Snyder scoffs at Jack. “I don’t want him to die, neither. Tell him he’s stupid.” But Katherine knows that Jack will never take back his proposal.

“I’m not leaving you,” she says instead of arguing about his decision. “I started this with my article. He’s angry at both of us – aren’t you, Mr. Snyder.” It’s not a question.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Ace,” Jack mutters angrily, looking like he might fling her from the building himself. She stands and steps closer to him, knowing that Snyder would never have agreed anyway. His army of boys tenses, ready to round them up for their punishment.

Then Romeo charges into the room.

“Sorry we’re late, boys,” he says, using his elbow to jab one of the thugs in the back and send him crashing to the ground.

Jack grabs him immediately and yanks him away from the fight, planting himself firmly in front of the younger boy. Scowling at being removed so quickly, Romeo looks like he wants to run back at the remaining enemies. But when he notices Race on the ground he runs to him automatically, dropping to his knees beside him and pulling his head into his lap.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Race mutters. His voice is gruff, but his eyes are crossing slightly.

Specs and Albert dart in next, each taking down another boy and coming to stand by Jack’s side. “Yeah,” Sniper says from behind them – somehow, he’s already snuck his way into the room. “We’d have been here sooner, but _somebody_ couldn’t find her – what was it, Smalls?”

“My stick,” she calls proudly from the hall. Jack raises his eyebrows questioningly, but it’s clear what she means when she comes around the corner wielding a club nearly as long as her arm.

“Where the hell did you get that?” he asks, and his tone reassures Katherine – there’s hope in his voice again.

“A poker game I snuck into last week.” With her red hair and high-pitched voice, Katherine severely doubts her ability to sneak anywhere. This is not something she would ever say to her face, though – especially not when she’s carrying that. Katherine doesn’t remember seeing her at the last fight, but it’s clear she’s going to make up for it. Even the Delancies back away.

“I am not paying you to STAND AROUND!” Snyder shrieks from his post in an alcove. There is a moment of hesitation, and then the thugs spring into action again. One engages Specs in a fistfight, and Smalls has two circling her alone.

“Guys, get outta here!” Jack says, a note of panic returning to his voice. There are two of Snyder’s boys stationed at the door, but no one is engaging him in the fight – it’s almost as if they know it’s more of a punishment to make him watch the others get taken out. “You’re gonna get hurt–“

“No we ain’t, Jack!” Romeo yells, helping Race stand up, and to Katherine’s surprise he’s smiling. He leaps up on a chair and throws his hands in the air. “Crutchie had an idea! We’re gonna get saved!”

“That’s fantastic,” Race mutters, dodging a Delancey only to trip over his own feet and land on the ground again behind Jack. “What exactly is this great idea?”

Romeo just shakes his head. “I can’t ruin it. Trust me, you’ll know when it gets here.”

“Where is Crutchie, anyway?” Katherine asks. Romeo just shakes his head.

“He’s bringin’ the idea! That’s all I’m sayin’.”

Jack swings a punch at Oscar, who was slowly approaching Race again, but he hits him with his bad hand and doubles over, swearing. Oscar doesn’t even flinch.

“You tired, Kelly?” he spits. “Cause that was pathetic, even for you.”

“Just didn’t wanna waste all my energy on you,” Jack mumbles through gritted teeth, but Oscar shoves him to the ground halfway through the explanation. Katherine jumps forward to catch him, but loses her balance, and he ends up on top of her. He rolls to the side quickly, but can’t seem to muster the energy to push himself to his feet.

So she doesn’t move either, wrapping an arm around him instead. He leans heavily against her.

“You know, there’s two of us and two of you,” Morris says, coming over to stand beside his brother. Somehow he’s managed to obtain the stick, and Katherine looks in a panic around but can’t see its owner. “So neither of you have to wait. I wonder who’ll scream louder.”

It breaks Katherine’s heart, but Jack has clearly given up, curling around her on the ground to shield as much of her as his thin body can. But in all honesty, she doesn’t know what else they can do. Even if she could manage to muster the false bravado to threaten them with her father’s wrath, she knows she could never be convincing enough to stop them. She wonders if he’ll even notice she’s gone.

Morris raises the club. “I’ve been waiting for this a long time–“

“Hey Morris, you probably don’t wanna do that.” A quiet voice echoes through the room from the door. It’s Crutchie, and Jack tenses even further now that he’s in danger as well. But then a deeper voice speaks up and Katherine knows everything is going to be okay.

“Mr. Snyder,” Governor Roosevelt says, “you will not believe how many people are looking for you.”


	22. Chapter 22

The room falls dead silent, with the exception of Morris dropping the stick. (It bangs against Katherine’s foot, but she doesn’t even care.) Realizing payment isn’t a possibility now, Snyder’s boys duck immediately out of the room, and Roosevelt lets them go. The real reason he’s here is still cowering in the alcove, where he’d been trying to stay in charge but safely out of the fight at the same time.

Snyder takes a long, calculating look at Roosevelt and then bolts suddenly for the door, counting on everyone’s surprise to allow him to push his way through to freedom. For a moment, it looks like he might succeed, too – the governor seems more amused than anything, simply standing to the side as if to see what will happen. But with a wild yell, Crutchie steps into his path, bringing the crutch down on his head with a dull crack.

“Oops,” he mumbles as the man slumps to the ground. “I didn’t . . . I didn’t know that would happen.”

“You know, I did have men stationed around the building,” Roosevelt says with a deep chuckle. He pats Crutchie on the shoulder so hard the boy almost falls over, and he scrambles to get his crutch back under his arm. “You were with me when I told them where to go, after all. But I must say, that was far more effective.”

Crutchie smiles sheepishly.

Beside her, Jack is cracking up at Crutchie’s expression, but it’s a high, fragile sound that she fears might become hysterical if she doesn’t calm him down. She stands and pulls him to his feet, taking care not to grab his injured hand.

“It’s okay,” she says, pulling his arm around her shoulders. He shakes his head slowly as if trying to clear water from his ears. She reaches up and straightens his hat.

“That was intense,” he breathes finally, listing a little to one side. She tightens her grip around his waist, rubbing circular patterns on his side with her fingertips.

“It’s over, though,” she says with a forceful look at the Delancies. They stand frozen in the corner of the room, watching the governor with narrowed eyes. “No more fighting.”

She practically drags him behind her as she walks toward the door, but she doesn’t slow down – she wants him out of there, now. She stands by Roosevelt in the hall, watching as the other boys (and Smalls, who has a bruise on her cheek but looks otherwise unharmed) hobble past. Governor Roosevelt smiles at her, his mustache quirking up at the corners of his mouth.

“Sorry I couldn’t be here sooner,” he rumbles. “But you’ve got some brave boys looking out for you, Miss Pulitzer.”

She doesn’t even correct him about her name. “I do, don’t I?” she says instead, pressing a small kiss to Jack’s cheek. He blushes, but his grin makes her smile even bigger in return.

When she makes the mistake of glancing back into the room one last time, she catches the glimmer that the light leaves on the tear tracks working their way down Oscar’s face. She shakes her head, turning away quickly and leading Jack down the stairs.

Crutchie looks up as they emerge from the building, having just finished pointing a few uniformed men upstairs. “They’re goin’ to take care of Snyder,” he explains proudly. “I don’t he’ll be gettin’ out again any time soon.”

“You did good, Crutch,” Jack says, swatting the younger boy’s hat down over his face. “You sure saved the day.”

Crutchie blushes, smiling shyly at them. “I figured if I could do something that would help more than just getting in the way during the fight–“

“You ain’t never in the way, Crutchie,” Jack says forcefully, cutting him off. “But this was brilliant.”

“It really was. Thanks, Crutchie,” Katherine says, pulling him into a hug with the arm that isn’t still wrapped around Jack. He sighs happily against her.

“Anything for you guys,” he whispers. “We’ve gotta keep this family safe.”

“Hey Plums,” Race calls from near the street, where he’s leaning heavily on Romeo but grinning anyway. “I don’t mean to pull the ‘you owe me’ card or nothin,’ even though I totally saved your ass back there. But was I hearin’ right that you got a shower back at your place?”

 

The line for her shower stretches down the hallway and into the living room, and the ripe scent of unwashed newsboys has wafted throughout the entire apartment. The loud clamour of their voices has also taken over her home, but she and Jack managed to find some measure of quiet in the kitchen.

“Ow,” he mutters, twisting his hand in the bandage for the tenth time as she finishes wrapping his injury. Katherine scowls at him.

“Why are you more whiny when I’m trying to _fix_ you than when you actually got hurt, exactly?”

Jack shrugs, nuzzling against her shoulder (to distract her, she thinks). “I’m thinkin’ about it now. I wasn’t before. I was worrying about you.”

“You’re an idiot,” she tells him, though what she really means is that she loves him. She figures he knows this by now.

“Hey,” he says, picking his head back up and ducking down to catch her eyes. “I gotta ask you somethin’.”

“Okay.” She frowns at his serious tone – since they got back to her place and the boys all lined up by the bathroom door, safe and sound, he’s been nothing but playful. It was a quick personality change, and she knows part of it’s an act, but she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying the break from the melancholy.

“What exactly was wrong with the Delancies back there?”

She shrugs. “They weren’t getting their money? They didn’t get to kick us around as much as they would have liked?”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “They weren’t just pissed. They were actually upset. It ain’t like them.”

Sighing, she lines up his bandaged fingers with her own, looking anywhere but his face. “They needed it to buy medicine, apparently. For their mother.”

“She’s sick?”

Katherine nods. “They were talking about it while they were dragging me around last night. It sounds bad.”

“Well damn.” Jack’s voice cracks, and she knows he’s thinking of his own parents, morally weighing the injustice of leaving someone – anyone – to a fate similar to his.

“Don’t do this,” she murmurs, letting her head fall against his chest. “They would have killed you back there. They don’t want your sympathy.”

“I know, Ace,” he breathes against her hair. “I know.” But he doesn’t sound too sure anymore.

To distract him, because she desperately wants him to stay happy, she kisses him. She tries to keep it slow – after all, the boys are _right_ _there_ – but before long he’s jumped down from the counter and flipped them around so she’s pressed against the ledge. His good hand is tugging at her hip, and she gently takes his injured one and cradles it against her chest. And when he pulls back a bit, she gasps a little too loudly–

“What are you doin’ in there, Jack?” Romeo yells from the couch. The rest of the boys crack up at the question, and Katherine looks away from Jack quickly, her face turning red.

“Plums,” Race snickers from next to him as Jack staggers into the living room, blushing himself and very out of breath. He shoots Race a dirty look and aims a purposely miscalculated kick at his ankle. It strikes the leg of the couch instead, and Race sticks out his tongue.

“If you weren’t brain-damaged right now I’d smack you,” Jack tells him, collapsing on the arm of the chair where Crutchie sits. Race merely smirks, unconcerned.

Once Katherine’s arranged her face into a calmer expression, she carries in the tray of tea that had been cooling in the kitchen. “Don’t worry,” she says when she sees the boys’ nervous glances. “Jack made it, not me, and he definitely put in enough sugar to mask the bad taste.”

“That’s good enough for me,” Mush grins, reaching for a mug.

It must taste alright, because they down it faster than she would have believed possible. When the last boy emerges from the bathroom – it’s Specs, still dripping wet with his shirt wrapped around his neck rather than on properly – Crutchie starts to stand up.

“Thanks, Katherine, but we’d better be gettin’ back,” he says, giving Jack a calculating look. “Thanks for takin’ care of us, an’ take care of Jack, but it’s a long walk back an–“

“But it’s still cold out, and everyone’s so tired!” Katherine knows she’s going to regret this eventually, but she shakes her head. “I don’t think so. You stay as long as you need to.”

“You mean it?” Romeo asks, looking as if he’s afraid to believe it. “In a real house? There’s heat here an’ everything! And food! And do you have a pet?”

“Now, hold up!” Jack says loudly, his eyes wide. “You guys ain’t moving in here or nothing. We’ll just stay till morning, or till you get tired of being so close to each other and start tryin’ to kill each other.”

“I mean it,” Katherine says, ignoring him. “As long as you want.”

The next morning the boys don’t leave until after a huge breakfast (bought from the corner cafe). Jack stays considerably later, leaving just enough time to make it to the _Sun_ ’s office before it closes and turn in his newest drawing. And this time, Katherine is sure he’ll be back.


	23. Chapter 23

“Jack?”

Katherine Plumber is shocked to see the newsboy sprawled at the end of her bed, her curtains billowing in the breeze coming through the wide-open window. She’d have thought he’d been with his boys – he’d promised them all a trip to the ice cream parlor that just opened with the money he’d made from his cartoons.

“Hey,” he murmurs, raising his head slightly and giving her a little wave before flopping back again. “How’s it goin’?”

She shakes her head, moving to the window to close it. “How’d you get in?” she asks — not that she’s complaining, of course. But still. “I thought I locked it.”

He shrugs, sitting up and rubbing his neck a little uncomfortably. “I’ve been practicing gettin’ into places. Since you were locked in that room.” Shaking his head, he reaches for her hand. She crosses her arms just before he catches it, but smiles gently. “I ain’t never lettin’ that happen again. An’ if that means practicing on your window . . .”

He’s incorrigible, completely and totally. She swats at his hat, knocking it over his eyes. “Jack Kelly, I swear–“

“You know you love me, Ace,” he interrupts, fixing his hat and stretching his arms above his head as he lies back again with a smirk. “You ain’t ever complained about me showin’ up here before. You’re glad I’m here.”

“Shouldn’t you be with the boys?” She doesn’t agree, but of course she would never deny it, either. “They’re going to be upset if they don’t get their ice cream.”

It was an innocent question, but his face falls almost imperceptibly the second it leaves her lips.

“Did I– It’s not that I didn’t want to see you, Jack–“ she stammers, trying to bring the smile back to his face, but he looks away, pulling something small and white out of his pocket. It’s an envelope.

She tugs it gently from his fingers, flips it open and peers inside. Nestled in the paper are dollars — a substantial amount of them. She eyes him questioningly.

“That’s why I came to talk to you,” he mumbles. For some reason, his voice sounds a little shaky, and he won’t meet her eyes. “The money I was gonna use for the ice cream is in there.”

“Along with every pay check you’ve gotten so far, it looks like,” she observes. What was he doing with this all in his pocket?

“An’ the money I had saved for a ticket to Santa Fe.”

She opens her mouth to ask him why he’d gathered all of his savings. Her heart has dropped – is something wrong? Is he finally leaving her, now that she thought everything was over? But before she gets the words out, her eyes catch a scribble of ink on the front of the envelope. There’s a name etched there, in Jack’s messy handwriting.

 _Delancey_.

Suddenly everything clicks, and she looks at him with new understanding. “Jack–“

“Is it the right thing to do?” he asks. His eyes are wide, and very blue, and she wishes she had an answer that could make the lost look leave them. “I’m asking you cause I honest to God don’t know. They ain’t never been nice to me. They hurt Crutchie bad, an’ they get some sort of sick pleasure out of working for guys like Snyder.” He sighs, shakes his head. “But they coulda hurt you so much worse, and they didn’t. They coulda killed me the second they had me in that room, an’ they didn’t. An’ however much I hate them, it don’t seem right to leave an innocent woman to die.”

“Is she innocent if she raised _them_?” Katherine mutters, but she hands the envelope back to Jack all the same.

“It ain’t fun watching your parents wastin’ away,” Jack whispers. “Maybe they’ll get meaner if she dies. Maybe they’ll change if we help save her.”

“Maybe.” She isn’t sure anything could erase the damage that years of hardship and hurt have done to their personalities. But if even Jack wants to give them that chance . . .

“That means I can’t buy the guys ice cream, Ace, an’ they won’t understand why. It means I might have to sleep on the streets for awhile, an’ it means that I ain’t gonna be able to look at rings or nothing till I work a lot longer. But–“

She shakes her head, turning away and reaching for her coat where it’s hanging on the door and rummaging around in the pocket. “You aren’t sleeping on the street, and your boys are getting ice cream. Jack Kelly, you selfless idiot.”

“I didn’t know. If you think it’s a bad idea–“

“Of course it’s not.” She shoves a couple of dollars at him and raises an eyebrow dangerously, daring him to refuse. “Buy the boys a treat from me, and get your butt back here tonight. I swear, if I find you in an alley somewhere–“

“You won’t.”

She shakes her head, scowling at him. “And that was the most pathetic proposal I’ve ever heard.”

Jack pales, scooting back away from her on the bed. She’s not sure he’d meant to say everything he had in his hurried explanation. “Huh-uh, Ace, that ain’t it. I ain’t much of a romantic, but even I wouldn’t do it that bad.”

“Oh.” She blushes, turning away a little. When he’d mentioned a ring, she’d thought–

“It was me explaining why I can’t for awhile.”

Oh. There’s a pause, while she works up the nerve to look back at him and he flushes red at her gaze. He looks guilty, and she knows he’s worrying that he’ll never be good enough for her, but she’s frankly tired of that attitude.

“I don’t deserve you, you know.” She’s said it before and she’ll probably say it again, but she’s not sure she’ll ever mean it more than she does at that moment. “I honestly haven’t thought of their mother since that night.”

It’s like the hem of his shirt has suddenly become the most interesting thing in the world – he stares at it, frowning, his fingers playing with the stitching.

“I lived through it, Ace,” he says. “Watching someone you know you can’t help waste away, waiting for them to die. Even they don’t deserve that.”

“I mean, my mother and sister died,” she says, unsure if she’s trying to make him feel better or herself a little less guilty. “And it was terrible. I guess I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But–“

“I’m sure you did all you could for them,” he says. “But sometimes people can’t afford that.” He glances at her, looks quickly away again, then swallows thickly. “My dad wasn’t sick or whatever you was probably thinkin,’ that time I told you about him.”

She blinks, confused. “But you just said–“

“I watched this city literally kill him,” Jack breathes. “It beat him down and he slowly lost his mind, an’ then one night he just couldn’t take it anymore. Flung himself off the highest roof he could find.”

He pulls his knees up to his chest, and she wants to comfort him somehow, but she can’t help flinching back. “What?” Suddenly she understands Jack’s response to her comment about his father being sensible. And that understanding gives her an icy feeling inside.

Jack chokes out a laugh. “The guys who took him away after tried to charge me for that,” he forces out. “When I didn’t even have enough money to get him some food, try to make him feel better an’ think straight.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says immediately, pulling him close. He rests his head against her shoulder, but he’s not crying. Maybe there comes a point where you can’t cry anymore, she thinks. She hasn’t shed a tear over her mother for some time, not because she doesn’t miss her but because she misses her too much. “You couldn’t have done anything.”

“I’ll never know that,” he whispers. She feels his voice vibrating against her skin. It tickles, but she feels more like sobbing than laughing. “But I can do something here.”

“Jack Kelly, playing the hero,” she whispers back. “Your parents would be proud.”

She feels him smile against her shoulder. And then he looks up and kisses her.

There are so many emotions in the kiss, she can’t make sense of them all. At first it’s gratitude over her support, gentle and appreciative, but as the stress and uncertainty of all that’s happened washes over them, it becomes something more. His arms are around her so tightly she can hardly breathe, crushing her to him as his lips move against hers, and without his knees on either side of her to steady her her legs may have given out.

When she remembers how to think again she’s clinging to his vest, panting and leaning against him with all of her weight because honestly, she’s still not sure she could stand. They’ve pulled away enough to breathe, but their noses are still touching. Jack slowly ducks his head back to her shoulder, leaving a trail of kisses in his wake.

“You know, I ain’t gonna take my shirt off again,” he mumbles against her throat, and she laughs, blushing. There was a time when such flirting was just something he did on principle, because he knew it got to her, but his voice is genuinely shaking now. “I gotta go soon, get back to the boys.”

“You’re not hiding any new bruises under there?” Her tone is higher than she would have liked, but at least she gets the words out.

He smirks. “Nope. I’ve been playing real nice lately. An’ with this–” he holds up the envelope again, shrugging. “I ain’t bribing them or nothing, but it can’t hurt, either. You think they’ll take it?”

“If they love their mother they will,” she says. “I’d have done it for mine, that’s for sure.”

With one final kiss – a quick one this time, with a promise for later – he slides off the bed and backs away, bumping into her nightstand on the way back to the window. He waves cheekily as he climbs down the ladder out of sight, his face still a bit red. She waves back, smiling slightly, and doesn’t lock the window when she slides it shut.

She knows he’ll be back, and she knows they’ll be all right. Maybe things will never be easy, but they’ll be able to take it. They have each other, and the boys.

Whatever comes in the aftermath, they’ll face together.


End file.
